A Non Philosophical Theory of Nature - Ecologies of Thought

A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature
Radical Theologies
Radical Theologies is a call for transformational theologies that break

out of traditional locations and approaches. The rhizomic ethos of
radical theologies enable the series to engage with an ever-expanding
radical expression and critique of theologies that have entered or seek
to enter the public sphere, arising from the continued turn to religion
and especially radical theology in politics, social sciences, philosophy,
theory, cultural, and literary studies. The post-theistic theology both
driving and arising from these intersections is the focus of this series.
Series Editors
Mike Grimshaw is an associate professor of Sociology at Canterbury
University in New Zealand.
Michael Zbaraschuk is a lecturer at the University of Washington,
Tacoma and a visiting assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University.
Joshua Ramey is a visiting assistant professor at Haverford College.
Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism

By Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins
The Apocalyptic Trinity
By Thomas J. J. Altizer
Foucault/Paul: Subjects of Power
By Sophie Fuggle
A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought
By Anthony Paul Smith
A Non-Philosophical
Theory of Nature
Ecologies of Thought
ANTHONY PAUL SMITH

A NON-PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF NATURE
Copyright © Anthony Paul Smith, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-33587-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-46328-2 ISBN 978-1-137-33197-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137331977
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Anthony Paul, 1982–
A non-philosophical theory of nature : ecologies of thought /
Anthony Paul Smith.
pages cm.—(Radical theologies)
1. Ecology. 2. Nature. 3. hilosophy. I. Title.
QH541.S57 2013
577—dc23 2013002097
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: July 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I The Perversity of Nature Foreclosed to Thought

1 Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse 13
2 Ecology and Thought 19
3 Philosophy and Ecology 27
4 Theology and Ecology 45
Part II The Non-Philosophical Matrix

5 Theory of the Philosophical Decision 59
6 The Practice and Principles of Non-Philosophy 73
7 Non-Theological Supplement 95
Part III Immanental Ecology and

Ecologies (of ) Thought
8 Real Ecosystems (of) Thought 113
9 Elements of an Immanental Ecology 125
10 Ecologies without Nature 157
Part IV A Theory of Nature

11 Separating Nature from the World 167
12 Materials for a Theory of Nature 189
vi Contents
Conclusion: Theory of Nature 217
Notes 227
Bibliography 261
Index 271
Series Preface
Radical Theologies encompasses the intersections of constructive theology,

secular theology, death-of-god theologies, political theologies, continental
thought, and contemporary culture.
For too long, Radical theology has been wandering in the wilderness,
while other forms of theological discourse have been pontificating to
increasingly smaller audiences. However, there has been a cross-disciplinary
rediscovery and turn to radical theologies as locations from which to engage
with the multiplicities of twenty-first-century society, wherein the radical
voice is also increasingly a theologically engaged voice with the recovery
and rediscovery of radical theology as that which speaks the critique of
“truth to power.”
Radical Theologies reintroduces radical theological discourse into the
public eye, debate, and discussion by covering the engagement of radi-
cal theology with culture, society, literature, politics, philosophy, and the
discipline of religion.
Providing an outlet for those writing and thinking at the intersections
of these areas with radical theology, Radical Theologies expresses an inter-
disciplinary engagement and approach that was being undertaken without
a current series to situate itself within. This series, the first dedicated to
radical theology, is also dedicated to redefining the very terms of theology
as a concept and practice.
Just as Rhizomic thought engages with multiplicities and counters
dualistic and prescriptive approaches, this series offers a timely outlet for
an expanding field of “breakout” radical theologies that seek to redefine
the very terms of theology. This includes work on and about the so-labeled
death-of-god theologies and theologians who emerged in the 1960s and
those who follow in their wake. Other radical theologies emerge from what
can be termed “underground theologies” and also “a/theological founda-
tions.” All share the aim and expression of breaking out of walls previously
ideologically invisible.
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Acknowledgments
When I first began looking at scientific ecology the horror present in

simplistic statements such as “everything is connected” became apparent
to me. Saying that everything is connected is meant to convey a Green
consciousness, but in reality the individual organisms present in those
connections and the amount of material and energy they exchange is over-
whelmingly complex. It can all seem too much!
It is with that sublime immensity of relationality in mind that I broach
with fear and trembling acknowledging those who have assisted and sup-
ported me during the all phases of work on this book, completed dur-
ing the course of my time at the University of Nottingham in the United
Kingdom from 2006 to 2011. First, I must thank Hayley Smith for all the
material support she has provided over the years without fully understand-
ing why I care so much about these strange ideas and notions. My mother
Laura Root deserves thanks for encouraging my weirdness early on, as well
as my budding interest in environmentalism and writing when at the age
of eight she helped me create a newsletter for my first grade class on Earth
Day. Then there are my friends Bradley A. Johnson and Daniel Colucciello
Barber who graciously read and commented on the draft chapters and
papers that made up the original thesis. The ideas of both have marked me
and encouraged me. Of course, strangely minor events, such as a drunken
conversation or overcaffeinated debate, often play a major role in the cre-
ation of ideas. Many of these conversations are required for a book like
this one, where many different fields of knowledge are engaged with and
held together. For those I must thank friends and colleagues who settled
in Nottingham for a time: Michael O’Neill Burns (for first arguing with
me about Badiou and then later about Hegel), Thomas Lynch (for dis-
cussions about liberation theology and what it means to do theology and
philosophy from a liberationist stance), Grant Whalquist (for discussions
about perversion in Bataille and for encouraging me to think about how
artists might receive these ideas), Sarah Fok (for discussions about creativ-
ity and applying philosophical concepts to problems outside philosophy),
Catriona Gold (for discussions about animals and letting me know when
x Acknowledgments
the theory-jargon got too much for a critical geographer), Stuart Jesson (for
discussions about nonviolence and generally being kind enough to listen),
Alex Andrews (for discussions about general systems thinking and having
done with a certain kind of theology), Karen Kilby (for always having a
sympathetic ear and for the trust and guidance she extended to me regard-
ing teaching), and Orion Edgar (for discussions, usually whisky fueled,
about the place of religious beliefs and practices and what they mean to
him in relation to nature, ecology, and food).
Of course dear friends outside Nottingham also played a role as sound-
ing boards for ideas. Nicola Rubczak, whose brilliant work encouraged
me to consider feminist ways of thinking, was an immense help in deal-
ing with issues in the French. Daniel Whistler, whose philosophical acu-
men I greatly admire, has been a tremendous help with short but brilliant
“tutorials” (often given on buses or trains or, on one occasion, short walks
around the strange but beautiful English countryside) on Spinoza, Fichte,
Schelling, and the relationship between philosophy and religion. Marjorie
Gracieuse for all the discussions about Laruelle and Deleuze as well as
calming me down when I was anxious about my viva. Liam Heneghan,
the philosopher stuck in an ecologist’s body and codirector of DePaul
University’s Institute for Nature and Culture, who not only gave me my
first paid academic work when I was an undergraduate student in philoso-
phy at DePaul University, but also became a close friend and helped me
navigate the world of scientific ecology. Two other DePaul friends deserve
to be thanked as well, though not for any direct contribution to the book:
William Jordan III helpfully slowed me down early in my research by put-
ting forth his own ponderous questions to me; and Peter Steeves provided
not only personal encouragement but also intellectual inspiration. Then
there is Adam Kotsko, who I have to thank for creating our little online
community of support, intellectually and financially, at the blog An und
für sich.
I was encouraged to turn the original thesis into a book, first, by my
PhD examiners Dr. Steven Shakespeare and Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson,
whose tough examination humbled and emboldened me, as does our con-
tinued friendship. However, it was the prodding and counsel of Joshua
Ramey that finally allowed this book to see the light of day. I am immensely
happy that he, along with his coeditors Mike Grimshaw and Michael
Zbaraschuk, wanted to include this book in their Radical Theologies series.
Burke Gerstenschlager at Palgrave has been very supportive and made the
publishing process feel human, a rare achievement in this business and
testament to his skills as an editor.
Finally, I continue to be amazed at the openness and kindness François
Laruelle has extended to me, always patient with my broken French and
Acknowledgments xi
persistent questions. Reading Laruelle opened up thinking for me and

made it exciting once more. This experience was a repetition of an earlier
event in my life, one that has marked the trajectory of my life for the
past 8 years. I’m thinking of the experience I had at the age of 20 when
I was living in Paris and reading—foolishly doing so in English!—Philip
Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. I knew then that
I wanted to be his student and I thank him for taking me on as well as for
all the guidance, freedom, and inspiration he has given me.
This list includes just humans! There is really too much to acknowl-
edge, too much to affirm, even in the heartache I experienced in my five
years at Nottingham surrounded by the jackals of radical orthodox theol-
ogy. This is the horror of everything being connected, but also a kind of
horror or shame at the amount of love that I have experienced in the midst
of that heartache and frustration. But I know this work is a product of the
expression of this love and grace, which is an exchange of love and grace
between all these friends and me. For this love and this grace are hidden
in the apparent words and thoughts that form this thesis. This is radical
immanence.
Earlier versions of some of the material that makes up parts I and II have
appeared in sections of “Thinking from the One: Non-Philosophy and the
Ancient Philosophical Figure of the One,” in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy,
edited by John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 19–41; “The Real and Nature:
A Heretical Nature contra Philosophy’s Nature,” in Identities: Journal for
Politics, Gender, and Culture 8.2 (2012), pp. 55–67; “A Stumbling Block
to the Jews and Folly to the Greeks: Non-Philosophy and Philosophy’s
Absolutes,” in Analecta Hermeneutica 3 (2011), pp. 1–16; “What Can
Be Done with Religion?: Non-Philosophy and the Future of Philosophy
of Religion,” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in
Continental Philosophy of Religion, edited by Anthony Paul Smith and
Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010),
pp. 280–298; and “Philosophy and Ecosystem: Towards a Transcendental
Ecology,” in Polygraph 22 (2010), pp. 65–82. I gratefully acknowledge the
permissions granted to use all this material.
Introduction
There is a very old philosophical story. We no longer have the full tale, but
only the ending that goes, “Nature loves to hide.” We don’t know if this
is a drama or a tragedy. If you say it with the right inflection it could even
be the punch line to a joke. But is the joke philosophical or is it a joke on
philosophy?
There is another story, even older, and this time theological. It begins
with the beginning (though whether or not it is the very beginning is up
for debate) saying, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth.” The story goes on to say that at that time the earth was formless
and would go on being nothing without this God. Now, they say this story
has an ending and we see there that the earth returns, “Then I saw a new
heaven and a new earth; for the first earth had passed away, and the sea
was no more.”
This story may be epic in scope, but we still don’t know if it is a joke or
not. And we don’t know who that joke is on. For nature has become a prob-
lem. Small talk is filled with discussion of this problem, for now when we
talk about nature we know that we’re talking in part about global climate
change. Some may say that it is shameful how human beings are unable
to work in harmony with nature. That we go against the order of nature.
But this present work began with a different thought. It began with the
thought that nature has become a problem for nature. For if human beings
are natural then there is nothing unnatural about what we are doing to the
biosphere. We haven’t risen above the natural in the creation of nuclear
power any more than the beaver does when he constructs his dam. The
problems caused to other living things by human pollution are entirely
natural. For what is, is natural. There is simply no other test for it. It’s not
as if we can name something an aberration of nature by measuring how
long it can persist living. Duration of living is relative after all and we know
that those creatures living now are but a tiny percentage of those who have
lived on this planet. Yet they were natural and their extinction too was
natural. It is natural to be born, to persist, and to die and it is natural to
2 A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature
the acts that occur during that persistence and even the “corruption,” what
we now call decomposition, that follows after death.
Nature is also a problem at the level of ideas. For the idea of nature
seems to have no direct object. I am unable to simply put nature in front
of me anymore than I can put Being or love in front of me. Rather than
attempting to think nature under this impossibility of objectification, we
instead see in the history of thought a proliferation of very different ideas
of nature. There is the Romantic understanding of nature, where one is
truly free and all is in balance, mingling openly with the pessimistic under-
standing of nature as the site of suffering, pain, and death. There is also the
theological understanding of nature as a good creation, which stands side
by side with the notion that nature is organized hierarchically such that
domination and even death is taken to be not just natural but also divine.
What interests me is not entering into philosophical and theological
debates about what nature could be. These seem to me to be intractable
debates that are more concerned with the philosophical or theological
project putting them forward rather than with thinking nature outside of
those projects. No, what interests me is rather that these projects, the pro-
liferation of strikingly different ideas concerning nature, are natural. And
so in this work I attempt to think and develop that very idea. Subsuming
thought into nature, but without becoming a naturalism or materialism,
without reducing ideas to some kind of “mere nature,” for this itself is but
one of those ideas about nature.
The method for this work is derived from François Laruelle’s
non-philosophy as he has developed it over the last three decades. This
method and the way I’ve synthesized it is explained at length in part II.
What Laruelle’s non-philosophy allows me to do is envisage a different
organization of thinking within different practices of knowledge. Rather
than the usual division of labor between a science that does not think and a
philosophy or theology that must think for science and thereby make sense
of its stumbling across reality, Laruelle fosters a democracy (of) thought
that includes philosophy and science expressed also as a unified theory
of philosophy and science. Even the way he writes this democracy (of)
thought, with the suspended “of,” speaks to this practice of a real democ-
racy as the relationship between democracy and thought is itself suspended
and becomes instead as if One. And the figure of the One is also of great
importance here, as our attempt to think a nature that brings about the
effects of the ideas of nature is also an attempt to think nature prior to
Being and Alterity. To think what Laruelle calls the radical identity of
nature as if One.
However, there is also a model for the work that I have used but
that I don’t discuss at any length. I suspect those who know it can feel
Introduction 3
its influence, but it remains somewhat concealed. That model is Philip

Goodchild’s work as developed in his Capitalism and Religion: The Price of
Piety (2002) and Theology of Money (2009). The second book develops a
theory of money using the tools of philosophical and theological analysis
in dialogue with economics, in much the same way that I develop my own
unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology to construct a theory
of nature. In the first book Goodchild, who was of course my doctoral
advisor, creates a critical theory of piety by using a multitude of thinkers
as catalysts for thinking. The work of each thinker is not presented in a
purely scholarly fashion, rather each thinker is presented in that book as
a condensed crystal. These “readings” are not reductive, however, but are
intensive and so it would be a mistake to read that book with the inten-
tion of learning how to do historical scholarship or historical readings on
Deleuze or Marx or Spinoza or whomever. Rather, though this is mixed
with the language of Laruelle, each thinker becomes a simple material that
is put into the process of thought reorganized around attention to that
which matters most. What matters most according to Goodchild is suffer-
ing. Suffering also directs my attention here, though it may be obscured
somewhat through the form it has taken.
For, as an academic work, it tends toward a certain distance from exis-
tential concerns raised by what is commonly called the environmental cri-
sis. I myself prefer not to refer to this ongoing event as a crisis, since the
word “crisis” suggests that there is some point in time and space where
certain forces will converge, or more realistically have converged, and thus
we may be led to think, in some heroic fantasy, that human beings can
marshal a kind of army against the forces of destruction and turn back this
crisis. The reality is more distressing. For the so-called environmental crisis
is now more our everyday reality as climate, as even newspapers move from
discussing natural disasters to the normalization of “weird weather.” As
such it feels too ordinary in its weirdness to be a crisis. Moreover, the force
of destruction is simply the political and social organization of human life.
This is an organization that in many ways works and because of this pro-
ductive power as organization we see no way out. It also may seem like this
work is distant to suffering because of the high level of abstraction going
on. The project is ostensibly concerned with the most abstract, “thought,”
and it goes about thinking with an incredibly abstract system that is in
many ways alien to standard philosophical and theological forms of think-
ing. Yet, this alien nature is intentional. It is an attempt, begun early in
my studies, to think as immanently as possible and to find in that way of
thinking not a thought without an exterior, which would set up any end
to suffering as an impossibility, but to think the immanence of nature as
both real and the source and outworking of a resistance to suffering and
the powers of this World. This only seems strange, I claim, because what
is most immanent to us is also most alien precisely because of the hallu-
cinatory transcendent structures of thought developed in philosophy and
theology. And to break from those transcendent structures I infect them
with material from scientific ecology. This mutation causing infection
should not be confused with raising science to the level of the sole arbiter
of truth. It would be counterproductive to simply reverse the hierarchy of
science and philosophy/theology as if science was to become some kind
of priest for immanent divinity. But science, I argue following Laruelle,
has a particular posture in its practice, one that is paralleled in theology
to some extent, that thinks from its object and changes its practice on the
basis of its relation to that object. This posture is an expression of radical
immanence.
So what is this immanence? What does radical immanence mean in
this work? The focus on immanence in recent Continental theory is due in
part to the importance given it in the work of Gilles Deleuze, but the term
was central for the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl as well. A focus
on immanence can be found at the heart of widely divergent thinkers such
as Alain Badiou, who understands his philosophy to be materialist, and
immanence can be found in virulent antiscience theological philosophies
such as that of Michel Henry’s. In each thinker the meaning of the word is
different, but in its most common Deleuzian form it is sometimes confused
by some English-language commentators as being a variant of naturalism.
This interpretation is shared in a hostile register by Radical Orthodoxy
theologians. Thus they take the notion of there being no absolute exterior
to immanence to mean that there can be no appeal to something other:
there is nothing but what there is.
In my view this reading of Deleuze is wrong, but dealing with those
readings and presenting a counter-reading is outside the scope of this proj-
ect, which begins instead with Laruelle’s understanding of immanence.
He himself differentiates this from what he takes to be Deleuze’s under-
standing for Deleuze, according to Laruelle, attempts to think an absolute
immanence whereas Laruelle thinks from a radical immanence. Radical
immanence is the experience or style of thinking in-One or from the
Real. Laruelle explains his theory of immanence, differentiating it from
the philosophical “misadventures” of immanence writing, “In philosophy,
Marxism included, immanence is an objective, proclamation, an object;
never a manner or style of thinking.”1 Radical immanence is different from
the Nature of naturalism; it is different from a quasi-thing above con-
sciousness or humanity. Thinking in the manner of radical immanence
is to think neither as a part in a whole, nor as a cog in a cosmic machine,
but in a manner already-manifest prior to thinking as inscribed within a
Introduction 5
system. For that system itself is produced from that immanence. Radical
immanence is prior to ontology or to the difference or alterity to ontology.
Thus we can speak of the immanence of what is, but this “what is” is never
a “merely what is.” For radical immanence is what is, but it is also what
could be and what could have been but will never be. More than this, it
is lived. It is the thought thinking more than it is the totality of thought.
It is not a system, but neither is it unknowable. It is both fleshly, because
a creatural body is radical immanence, but it is also the potential for that
body to die and to love. It is the unconcealed prior to knowledge, prior
to theory, and theory can never circumscribe it but can recognize that it
already is it. This conception of immanence avoids a kind of ideational
friend/enemy distinction between itself and transcendence. This is true
for two reasons: first, transcendence is understood as an effect or a pro-
duction of immanence from this position because, second, transcendence
is in some sense Real at the relative level. There is no reason from the
perspective of the radical immanence of a lived body that what is must
be. There is a relative transcendence at work in the life of that lived body,
but that relative transcendence must be thought in the manner of a lived
body. Nature as a transcendent, quasi-thing is thought in the manner of
radical immanence and in this way nature is thought in exile from worldly
Nature, a wandering Stranger, rather than one who is at home and content
with the mere what is.
This brings us then to the structure of the book. I have split the work
into four parts. In part I, I investigate the standard relationship between
scientific ecology and both philosophy and theology. I begin there with the
axiom: nature is perverse. This is to say it outruns thought. As a result, each
regional knowledge or knowing (the gerund is intentional) is in an equiva-
lent position with respect to nature: each remains partial and incomplete.
Beginning with this axiom already separates the work undertaken here
from classical Greek metaphysics, the transformation of that metaphysics
in Christian theology, as well as the contemporary forms of reductionist
naturalism and materialism. In this section I show how ecology’s object
is not nature as such, but the ecosystem. The ecosystem reveals aspects or
occasions of nature, but is not nature itself, for nature outruns ecological
thinking as well as philosophical and theological thinking. I then turn
to the respective relations between philosophy, theology, and ecology in
order to show the various types these dominant standard relational forms
may take. Philosophy has a subsumption type (which includes, at least
on most readings, Plato to Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger), where science
must be subsumed into philosophy in order to think, and a bonded type
(which includes Aristotle to Schelling and Žižek), where philosophy claims
to be bonded with science in its thinking. Theology is located within the
subsumption model, but finds that it can either be a declension type (which
includes, interestingly, Karl Barth and Pope Benedict XVI), where science
can only point to its fallenness, or an inflection type (which includes most
ecofeminists and the liberation theology of Leonardo Boff), where it can
transform itself by working with what it sees as the best, most theologi-
cally fruitful science. In each case, though, there is a certain shallowness in
terms of engagement with scientific ecology. For many philosophies this is
often in the name of some kind of naturalism or materialism taken from
a bonded model with physics. Yet many of the subsumption philosophies
and theologies also purposefully avoid engagement with ecology, as with
all science, as it aims to avoid the perceived failings of both naturalism and
materialism. Even when an inflection type theology thinks with science it
does so with the aim of transcending the shortcomings of naturalism and
materialism. The theory developed in the final part of the book also aims
to avoid naturalism and materialism. Or, rather, in precise terms, I aim for
a theory of nature that is not overdetermined by naturalism or materialism
but one that can nevertheless use naturalist and materialist philosophies in
its construction of a theory of nature just as it can use those philosophies
and theologies antagonistic to naturalism and materialism in the same way.
The survey and typology provided in part I thus serves two purposes: first,
to show the failure of philosophy and theology to engage in a deep way with
the material of scientific ecology and, second, to locate the ideational fields
(philosophy, theology, and ecology) that will be our sources in parts III and
IV for the construction of a non-philosophical theory of nature.
After this survey and typology of the dominant standard relational
forms, I turn in part II to a deep explication of François Laruelle’s
non-philosophy. Laruelle’s work is renowned for its difficulty, yet that
difficulty is but an expression of an attempt to think what is very diffi-
cult—the radical immanence of the One without recourse to subsuming
it into Being or Alterity. While Laruelle’s work has been lumped in with a
general trend in Continental philosophy that sees a return to engagement
with science, sometimes given the misnomer of “Speculative Realism,” his
project differs markedly from others grouped under this name, like the
science and technology studies of thinkers such as Bruno Latour as well as
the recent “return to the Real” in thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux.
The term “non-philosophy” often gives the reader a sense that this is a
philosophy that says no. Really though, the “non” in non-philosophy takes
its cue from the “non” in non-Euclidean geometry, and like non-Euclidean
geometry it does not negate philosophy, but thinks philosophically in a
different, more general way according to different axioms. Laruelle’s work
provides a model for how the theoretical humanities can come together
with scientific thinking while avoiding the pitfalls of positivism (which
Introduction 7
has certain structural resemblances with naturalism and materialism)

but still remain a transcendental practice (which he will go on to call an
“immanental practice”). As Laruelle’s work is relatively unknown in the
English-speaking world and because it provides the methodology for the
project, I have devoted a large section of the work to explaining the prac-
tice of non-philosophy. I begin with his theory of the philosophical deci-
sion, which at first appears as a simple criticism of philosophy but actually
functions in non-philosophy as a location of philosophy’s unacknowledged
limits and its identity. Locating these limits is what allows Laruelle to con-
struct a different way of thinking alongside scientific material while doing
something akin to traditional metaphysics. This metaphysics is divorced
from the usual absolute focus on Being and without recourse to an absolute
transcendent Alterity to break with the obsession with Being. Following
this explication of the philosophical decision I turn to the form this meta-
physics takes, which Laruelle calls a “philo-fiction.” Of real importance in
this chapter is the way this philo-fiction organizes a way of thinking that
does not aim to be absolute and allows for a mutated form of philosophical
thinking by way of scientific material. I then end part II arguing for what I
call a non-theology that deals with a potential weakness in non-philosophy’s
practice, insofar as it seems to mirror the theological structure of thinking
in a secular way. Non-Theology complements non-philosophy by allowing
it to engage with and mutate theological forms of thinking more intention-
ally than we find in Laruelle himself.
I then put the method of non-philosophy to use in part III, specifically
with regard to what Laruelle calls “unified theories” of philosophy and
some material outside philosophy. In this instance it is a unified theory
of philosophical theology and ecology or the construction of what I call
an immanental ecology. Here I follow Laruelle in his latest work where
he engages with a specific scientific material, which for him is quantum
physics, within the wider philo-fiction of non-philosophy. Part three is
bookended by discussions of ecology and philosophy, specifically with
regard to Laruelle and then with ecological thinkers Latour and Timothy
Morton who want to be finally rid of the idea of nature altogether. But
between these bookends I give special attention to the technical aspects
of scientific ecology, centered on the concept of the ecosystem, and try to
think through their consequences for a philosophical theology. While the
principles and practice of non-philosophy are what allows us to do this
with a certain rigor and consistency, the goal of this section is to provide
the conceptual tools necessary to think of thinking itself as ecological.
Ideas about nature found in philosophy and theology can now be treated as
if they could be explored ecologically, rather than ecology requiring a phi-
losophy or theology as such. The aspects or occasions of nature disclosed
in ecological principles and concepts, derived from the study of the eco-
system, challenge some standard philosophical and theological notions of
nature. However, instead of focusing on this challenge, which in many
ways would repeat some of the criticisms already made in part I, I focus on
trying to think philosophically and theologically from within the scientific
material. So, this challenge is presented not to shut down philosophical
and theological thought, but to actually be productive of a different way
of thinking within a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology
or immanental ecology.
This comes to fruition in part IV. Immanental ecology allows me to
treat philosophical and theological conceptions of nature as simple mate-
rial that can be reorganized into a new, more adequate theory of nature.
This comes out of a recognition of the perversity of nature as well as the
natural processes of the ecology (of) thought explored in earlier chapters.
It is important to understand that I am not claiming here that ecology
provides a more adequate understanding of nature and that philosophy
and theology need to simply explicate what ecology already thinks implic-
itly. This would again be a standard form of philosophy or theology that
understands the scientific material to be in some way separate from the
philosophical or theological practice. My claim is rather that nature, as
perverse, can never be thought fully by any single discourse and in fact
can never be thought fully. Instead I claim that the theory of nature con-
structed here is adequate to that reality, that a unified philosophical theory
and ecology can think nature otherwise than we find in naturalism. To
make that argument I first show that the various proliferating ideas about
nature are all thought under an unthought dominance of the World in
philosophy and theology. This worldliness of thinking about nature is
located as an invariant in philosophy that goes mostly unacknowledged. I
then turn to a philosopher who has made an investigation of World central
in his work, Martin Heidegger, and his use of the fourfold to think world-
liness. The fourfold, perhaps one of Heidegger’s more daunting concepts,
is treated under Laruelle’s non-philosophy (specifically a practice called
“unilateralization,” which is explained in part II) to create a single dyad
made up of two minor dyads. These dyads come to stand in for what is
commonly referred to as nature and culture, but as understood through a
relationship of veiling/unveiling and presence/absence. These relationships
are in many ways just as theological as they are philosophical, and indeed
there is a deep connection in the nature dyad with the way the relation-
ship between God and nature has played out in theology and philosophy.
I then turn to these various forms of relation that these dyads exhibit in
theology and philosophy by looking at St. Thomas Aquinas, Benedict de
Spinoza, Abu Ya’qûb al-Sijistânî, and Naīr al-Dīn al-ūsī. What is given
Introduction 9
in the presentation of these thinkers are not readings as such, but rather I
treat them as processes that can be treated ecologically precisely because
thought in general has already been shown to be ecological. I call these
processes, following Goodchild, an expression of piety. As this is a unified
theory of philosophical theology and ecology I am able to think of piety
as something ecological and ecology as being traversed by piety. For in the
unified theory both the terms of ecology and the terms of philosophical
theology are mutated. In this way I am not entering into a wider scholarly
debate, but instead I am treating these thoughts as ecosystems that have
material and energy that can be extracted.
Finally, in the conclusion, I construct a non-philosophical and
non-theological theory of nature using the materials and energies extracted.
This theory can be summarized as having a tripartite structure that under-
stands the creatural as subject of nature, the chimera of God or nature as
non-thetic transcendence of nature, and the One as radical immanence of
nature. This summary is in terms that will here, in the introduction to this
work, seem impenetrable, but by the end of the book should come to have
a determinate meaning for the reader. However, the general shape of this
theory can be understood if you consider what each aspect of the theory
avoids. For, by thinking nature as One or nature from radical immanence,
I am able to avoid both the subsumption and bonded model of philosophi-
cal and theological thinking. For philosophy and theology subsume nature
into their own ontological concerns and thus confuse nature with Being.
This may be why philosophers have claimed that nature loves to hide, for
they never actually looked for it, instead preferring to look for some matter
(materialism) or normative idea (naturalism) that nature would be reduc-
ible to. By thinking the chimerical identity of God or nature as a non-thetic
transcendence of nature I am able to avoid naturalism more fully, or rather
I am able to show that the transcendent, hypostasized conception of nature
operative in naturalism is actually a production of immanence and thus is
itself ecologically produced rather than providing metaphysical rules for
ecological processes. In this way a space for freedom is opened up. This
space is not opened up “in nature,” for freedom is natural, but is rather
opened up in the sense that the transcendent aspect of nature is ultimately
made relative to a lived immanence common to all creatures. This crea-
tural aspect of nature is what I claim is the subjectivity of nature. Nature
too has a subjectivity produced from its radical immanence such that every
creature is said to be natural. This disempowers any strong sense of nor-
mativity in “the natural” such as we find in Thomistic natural law theory.
For the perversity of nature is present as subject in the ongoing and diverse
creation of niches by species (which are immanently connected, as you
will see in chapter 9). Indeed there is a certain messianity present in this
subjective character of creatures, for as creatures constantly proliferate and

spring forth into the biosphere they reject the predictability of naturalism’s
sékommça or “that’s how it is.” In a very real sense the plethora of these
creatures, as the subject of nature, speaks to the destruction of every “law
of nature” (really an undue anthropomorphism) in the name of a single
law: that of the sabbath or a radical, if not absolute, freedom.
In short, what is created in this theory of nature, derived from the con-
struction of a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology, is a
nature that cries out violence against worldly Nature. For worldly Nature
conceived in a quasi-theological manner by naturalism is but a hallucina-
tion of an absolute. It presents itself as the cold measure of everything,
under which we would have no right, no power, or potential to protest
against it. But when this aspect of nature is shown to be a production of
the radical immanence beyond Being and Alterity, then the creatural sub-
jectivity of nature itself protests against the violence of this Nature. This
nature is then a Stranger, having rejected servitude to worldly Nature it
enters into exile from the World and wanders the earth without any tran-
scendent roots. This exile of nature, an exile that frees us not only from
bad and nearly forgotten jokes, is the common condition of every creature,
from the human being awaiting the advent of the messiah to the leaf turn-
ing itself toward the sun to receive its energy for the day.
Part I
The Perversity of Nature

Foreclosed to Thought
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 ecol-
ogy. This democracy (of) thought is not an end unto itself, but is neces-
sary 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 that—simple material that can be distributed and
organized in a different ecosystem (of) thought. This chapter serves to sur-
vey 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 recog-
nizing the radically foreclosed character of nature to thought. In terms that
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 terms—axioms and theorems—of 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 accommo-
date 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, shar-
ing much in common with the green notion of “small footprints,” seeks to
unveil the spiritual secrets of nature, to unveil nature though contempla-
tion, 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 nature’s 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 capital-
ist 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 refus-
ing 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 capitalism’s demand, to be measured as
Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse 15
something relative rather than the radical condition for any relative mea-
surement.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 mate-
rial of specific thinkers, and survey the whole of the field from a little
higher up. We have three distinct regional knowledges, what we call eco-
systems (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 philoso-
pher. 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 Leopold’s classic 1949 work A Sand
Country Almanac bears upon certain philosophical problems, both meta-
physical 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-Madison’s Department of Forest and Wildlife
Ecology and no one seems to think a professorship in philosophy was sto-
len from him.
We are comfortable calling the work of one a “philosophy,” the other

“theology,” and the third “ecology.” There is a deeper reason for that com-
fort 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 recog-
nizes 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. 52:16–17)6
Spinoza, insofar as he is not working within a particular community of

faith and aims at a universal knowledge that undercuts conflicts concern-
ing 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, Spinoza’s consider-
ations 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 one’s 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 com-
munity 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 deter-
mined 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 revela-
tion 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 mate-
rial. 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 philoso-
phy 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
the overdetermination of scientific ecology by prior philosophical or theo-

logical 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 relation-
ship of philosophy and ecology, and a short section on recent philosophies
of nature’s “bondedness” with physics, while saving a wider discussion of
philosophy’s 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 phenom-
enology 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 sci-
ence, 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 simi-
lar 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 anthropo-
centrism or chauvinism).
Chapter 2
Ecology and Thought
The most important concept within ecology is the ecosystem. This con-
cept has changed over time, but the currently accepted definition is that
the ecosystem is a physically locatable and quantifiable community formed
by a system of energy exchange between the living, the dead, and the nev-
er-living where, when energy animates the system, there is an exchange
of energy and material between the living and the dead.1 It is not often
understood that this concept, the most important and foundational within
ecology, was created in response to the overdetermination of ecology by
two schools of thought: organicism and mechanism. These schools of
thought are philosophical and theological in their make-up and concern
the reality of nature as such. The ecosystem concept is first articulated
in 1935 by A. G. Tansley in his unification of these two rival schools of
thought as they were understood and shaped by the material and stance
of ecology. The organicists, primarily developed in and from the work of
F. E. Clements, were opposed by the individualist reaction against organi-
cism of Henry Gleason and his followers. In Clements’s view the ecosys-
tem, which he named “biome,” was like a single organism where all the
parts worked toward the health of the whole. Whereas Gleason rejected
this organic view of nature and instead proposed that natural communities
of plants are simply a random grouping of individual species that existed
in that place because of the possibility of satisfying their needs, Tansley
rejected the organicism of Clements, but could not follow the coincidental-
ism of Gleason, which constituted a decisive critique of Clements’s views
but did not provide any satisfactory understanding of the relation between
plant communities. To overcome both their weaknesses Tansley forged a
new theory from the dyad of holistic organic community and individual-
istic coincidental community.2
Tansley’s conception of the ecosystem escaped overdetermination of

ecology by certain philosophical schools, but he himself remained repre-
sentationalist in his conception of an ecosystem. He considered the eco-
system a mental representation imposed on physical environments by the
ecologist whereas the actual environment was a whole arising out of the
prevailing relations. French ecologist Christian L évêque explains it this
way, “[The ecosystem] is thus an abstract reality formed mainly from ele-
ments that are themselves concrete.”3 In other words, Tansley’s original
conception of the ecosystem posits a nature that outstrips the ecosystem.
Yet ecologists came to see that, by using the ecosystem concept as a way of
organizing research and thereby advancing their methods, they could find
concrete objects able to be identified in spatial and temporal terms that
corresponded to the way the theoretical concept of an ecosystem worked.
In other words, the ecosystem concept exists in both theory and as physi-
cal object, not just as mentally constructed. In a way, then, Tansley’s orig-
inal conception shows the continuing contamination of ecology by the
nonecological. This is not uncommon as Daniel B. Botkin notes, ecology
has often taken “an advance in scientific thinking at [its] time [ . . . ] and
fixed it as though it were a permanent and final explanation.”4 The same
holds true for ecology’s interaction with philosophies and theologies of
nature, as Botkin shows in his conceptual history of nature and ecol-
ogy. In this section, following Botkin, we trace the interaction of ecology
toward nonecological thought, like philosophy and theology, to show the
shortcomings of these dogmatic images of nature imposed on scientific
ecology and also to show that the current popular models do not refer to
nature as such, but merely to the ecosystem. Ecology, much like environ-
mental philosophy and theology, has also failed to think in an ecological
nature, to mutate the philosophical and theological conception of nature
with its own concept of the ecosystem. This is not an indictment of the
scientific practices of ecology, however, as nature as such is not the object
of research nor could it conceivably be the object of any single regional
knowledge.
Looking through the history of ecological thought Botkin locates three
“classical” images of nature and two that are “evolved,” all of which were
or are prevalent at different times and in different cultural milieus.5 The
classical or foundational images are Nature as Divine Order, Nature as
Fellow Creature or as Organism, and Nature as Great Machine. These
then evolve into the more sophisticated images of Nature as Computer
or the Cybernetic model of Nature, and Nature as Biosphere. I will limit
the presentation here to the broad characterizations of each image of
thought just to highlight their particular determination of ecology. This
Ecology and Thought 21
will stand in contrast to the attempt taken later to create a unified theory
of philosophical theology and ecology.6
Nature as Divine Order
Botkin begins his historical survey with Nature as Divine Order.7 Under
this image, largely prior to the advent of ecological science, scientists
undertook the study of the environment under the presupposition that
nature tended toward an underlying equilibrium. This presupposition did
not rely on specific religious doctrines, but rather on what can be termed
“religious sentiment.” Any discussion of dogmatic theology is notice-
ably absent from Botkin’s overview.8 Rather, in the scientific writing of
Christian scientists, Botkin locates a reliance on the thought of Cicero,
Seneca, Plato, and Xenophon.9 Under this pregiven image scientists made
attempts to locate some sense of order (understood as equilibrium and pur-
posiveness) in nature, often in spite of observations to the contrary. This
belief in an ordered equilibrium led to an ecological theory of population
equilibrium between predator and prey, meaning that scientists assumed
there was a “natural” (meaning in actuality a truth that was transcendent
and eternal) relationship between predator and prey such that they would
always balance one another out. Botkin traced the failure of this view in
his own book through actual ecological case studies and one can see from
the practice of ecological restoration that the equilibrium theory simply
does not allow one to think the ecosystem as it really is. In other words, the
assumption of what is “natural” does not allow one to accept the actuality
or mode of existence of nature in ecosystems.
Botkin also highlights the anthropocentrism of this view. For the major-
ity whose thought persisted under this image nature has been ordered spe-
cifically for human beings.10 Botkin does not, however, discuss dominion
theory, which interprets this divine order as placing humanity at the pin-
nacle of creation as its Lord, or in more theologically respectable terms, its
Viceroy. Both views, however, present a very pernicious and ecologically
dangerous understanding of hierarchy. Everything praises the Creator of
the Divine Order through individual, dependent relations with the entities
directly higher up in the hierarchy. Thus, through the use made of nature
by human beings nature itself reaches its truest, best, and most beautiful
expression as given by its proper place in the hierarchy.
Under this image nature is ultimately only equilibrium, either as per-
fected or fallen, that is established correctly through hierarchy. Nature
thus should be static and each being in nature should express its own
static nature/essence if rightly attuned to the reality of the Divine Order as
underlying nature/essence.
Nature as Fellow Creature or Superorganism
Botkin moves from the Divine Order to the organic image of nature.11 This
image takes a number of different shapes depending on the cultural milieu
it develops within and is traced further back than the Judeo-Christian (one
should also add Islamic, though Botkin does not) culture prevalent in the
West today.12 Common to all these varieties, however, is the view “that the
Earth either is like a living creature or is a living creature.”13 Under this
view the Earth is seen to be an idealized or perfected version of an organ-
ism with an analogous organic structure of growth and decay.
Ecologists and other scientists outside the field of ecology largely reject
the organic view of nature today. It should also be noted that philosophers of
the so-called naturalist-materialist orientation often mock this view, while
many ecological philosophies and theologies have tried to reclaim it in the
light of the “new physics.” Despite this now ubiquitous position, there were
scientific attempts to prove the organic view, most notably the attempts
undertaken by the protoecologist and botanist F. E. Clements. Clements,
like many pre-twentieth-century thinkers, looked for the implicit order
underlying nature and saw there were associations of plants containing
discrete individual plant species that would not persist outside the wider
association of plants. This led Clements to the view that nature was like an
organism made up of particular and necessary organs that needed to work
as a whole. This was eventually disproven by Henry Gleason ultimately
relegating Clements to a minor place within the history of ecology as a
cautionary example of what not to think.
Botkin, like most ecologists, rejects the organic view of nature. He sums
up the reasons succinctly saying that the organic view of nature was depen-
dent, like the image of Divine Order, on a static understanding of plant
associations, which was extended to more general associations of organ-
isms, whereas observations show that individual species respond uniquely
to environmental factors. Further, the species that dominates a particular
environment changes continuously.14 However, Botkin is obviously not
comfortable simply mocking this view of nature. While he shows that this
view is indeed wrong from the ecological standpoint, he is also convinced
that the predominant mechanical view is also wrong and in the future
both will be thought to be equally silly and misleading.15
Nature as Great Machine
Along with many other ecologists, Botkin clearly thinks that the mecha-
nistic account of nature is wrong. Yet, it largely remains the dominant
image under which ecology labors. He traces the outlines of this image
last and emphasizes its connection with the image of Divine Order dem-
onstrating the homology of the mechanistic and theocentric theory of the
cosmos, as well its antagonism to the organic image.16 Under this image of
thought the Earth is dead, for it is a nonliving machine instead of a living
organism.17 The death of the Earth is predicated, however, on a theologi-
cal perception of beauty: “The mechanical view is constant with the idea
of a divine order in most of its particulars and consequences, and thus
the mechanical perspective simultaneously reinforced the ideal of divine
order and was reinforced by that theological perspective.”18 The theologi-
cal perspective Botkin is here speaking of is, of course, the human search
for a static and, due to that stasis, peaceful order to the cosmos that ulti-
mately serves or can be manipulated to serve human ends. There is a deep
connection here between an ecology guided by aesthetics and theological
thinking:
[T]he belief in aesthetically pleasing and theologically satisfying physi-

cal symmetries was replaced by a belief in an aesthetically pleasing and
theologically satisfying conceptual order. While the belief in gross physical
attributes of symmetry, balance, and order was no longer tenable following
the new observations of nature, Newton’s laws created a conceptual order.
Subsequently, theologians used this conceptual order to justify their belief
in a perfect world where a perfect order (the laws of nature) ruled our asym-
metric and structurally imperfect world.19
Thus the problem with the mechanical image is the same as the problem
with the image of Divine Order as both attempt to locate simple, solid-state
realities in nature despite the empirical findings of ecological fieldwork.
Nature is not a great machine in the sense of an ideal, nineteenth-century
machine that works according to an outdated physical model for the pur-
poses of static predictions. The one truth that this image could give us has
largely been occluded—nature is ultimately a duality of the artificial and
the natural. From a certain perspective nature is, of course, natural but
from another it is made up of artificialities as well. In other words, human
beings can act as engineers or custodians of this machine for the benefit
of all of nature (human and nonhuman). Yet, instead, the view has tended
to see nature as a divinely constructed machine that must either be left
completely undisturbed to remain perfect as such or completely subjected
to human mastery to be made perfect.20 The mechanical image fails not

because it displaces God, but because it perpetuates a theology that either
negates one aspect of the earth, humanity, or kills the whole of the earth
by refusing it life.
The Evolving Images: Cybernetic and Biosphere
Botkin then focuses his attention on two more images that are more
advanced and sophisticated: Nature as Computer or the Cybernetic image
and Nature as Biosphere or the earth as life-support system.21 These
images clearly have some origin in the preceding three, but make signifi-
cant advances on them as they are revised by ecological findings.
The cybernetic image of nature, however, does not provide an adequate
image of a nature that outstrips the biosphere or specific ecosystems, but
using computer modeling guided by mature human observation and
speculation can lead to helpful findings regarding particular ecosystems.22
This is because the computer, unlike the ideal physical machine, can help
ecologists to accurately model mathematically the stochastic reality of eco-
system development. The cybernetic model allows nature incarnated in
ecosystems to be known as they are: nondetermined (i.e., nonmechanical)
dynamic systems of complex exchange.23
This image can also be thought of alongside the other evolving image
of nature: nature as biosphere or life-support system. It should be noted
already that this image of nature is irreducibly coimplicated with the real-
ity of the planet earth as such. Botkin provides a wonderful and grotesque
description of this image by comparing it to the relationship between
a moose and the bacteria that live in the moose’s stomach and that the
moose in turn needs in order to continue living in its particular environ-
ment.24 The most well-known theorist of this image is, of course, James
Lovelock who developed the famous Gaia hypothesis. Under this theory
nature is thought of as a single system that regulates and makes possible
the development and perpetuation of life. Thus, the biosphere metaphor
says that there is some steady-state quality predicated for the planet as
a whole, but not to individual organisms, and this steady-state quality
must be understood within the wider stochastic events in large and small
ecosystems.25 It differs fundamentally from the organic image (though
obviously owing it some debts), a fact often missed in environmental the-
ology, in that the earth is not said to be alive, but is “a life-supporting and
life-containing system with some organic qualities, more like a moose than
a water-powered mill.”26
Images of Nature and Images of Ecosystems

The first three images Botkin outlines are beliefs about nature as such.
They propagated misunderstandings and became stratified as myths that
require their continuing evolution into other images. On the failures of
these images and the ecology that worked under their presuppositions,
Botkin writes damningly: “Until the past decade ecology has remained a
nineteenth-century science and has led us into failures in the management
of natural resources and to unsettling contradictions in our beliefs about
nature and therefore about ourselves.”27 The “evolving images” he traces in
the proceeding chapters are more beneficial for those projects that aim to
be intelligent and are considered in their ecological management of natural
resources, our continued understanding of the earth, and our place in its
systems, but they are not, properly speaking, images of nature. Instead,
these are images of the abstract ecosystem. This is clear in Botkin’s work
as his use of the word “nature” changes from the three chapters on classi-
cal images to the two on evolving images. In the first three the attempt is
to make sense of that which underlies particular natural areas and in the
second we find an account of the successful descriptions of those natural
areas, whether they are individual ecosystems or the world system of the
biosphere.
In other words, in the first we see what Alain Badiou has called the
passion for the Real.28 This passion, as explained by Badiou, is an attempt
to get beyond representation or semblance to what is truly real—to think
the Real itself. This is precisely the motivation behind early ecological
thought appealing to prior images of thought, to move beyond the sem-
blance, beyond “mere empiricism” as we may be misled by our senses, to
an unfolding of the science of ecology with the grain of the universe, in the
light of what is truly real. In some sense, then, the early ecological think-
ers recognized the perversity of nature, the ability of the Real to slip past
any thought of it and this is witnessed in their appeal to philosophical and
theological images of thought. That ecologists gradually stopped appeal-
ing to philosophy is not a sign that ecology’s passion for the Real eventually
faded, as passions often do, but was necessary because of the myriad errors
that such images of thought were leading ecology into with regard to their
primary material, the ecosystem. As shown in Botkin’s switch in language
regarding the “evolved” images of thought ecology in some sense had to
bracket the question of nature, overdetermined as it was by philosophical
and theological images of thought, in order to think the ecosystem as truly
real without the semblance of philosophical Nature or as a representation
of that Nature.
Yet, this doesn’t have to be the end of ecology and thought; this failure
to bring together ecology and thought, that is, philosophy and theology, is
limited because ecology was overdetermined by these images of thought.
Ecology, perhaps for being somewhat more humble than the so-called
thinkers of Big Science in biology and physics, has yet to go on the offen-
sive against philosophy and theology; ecology has not tried to take the
place of philosophy and theology, claiming that it can provide truth better
than them.29 Yet, the concepts that ecology has created and developed
through its history of practice should be a challenge for thought, without
thereby invading and colonizing thought, but instead being a posture that
thought begins to think in or a kind of change in identity when one “goes
under,” both in the sense of going under medication for surgery and in the
sense of going under a different name. We will return to this in the next
chapter, but first we must turn to the relationship of philosophy and ecol-
ogy, both philosophy of nature and environmental philosophy, to see what
happens when philosophy refuses the challenge of ecology and the missed
opportunity to make our thought ecological by “going under” ecology.
Chapter 3
Philosophy and Ecology
Many are looking to foster a relationship between ecology and philoso-

phy as it becomes clear that the reality of our contemporary age, as well
as the future that we are rushing headlong into, is determined in large
part by the environmental crisis. This attempt is not unprecedented as the
environmental movement and some form of environmental studies have
been around at least since the writings of John Muir and Henry David
Thoreau. The legacy of the relationship between ecology and philosophy
has been and continues to be led by the discipline of environmental ethics
and environmental aesthetics.1 In this way philosophy prescribes ethical
and aesthetic norms on the basis of facts given by scientific ecology, but
philosophy itself tends to remain unchanged by the encounter. There may
be some change, often favorable (a favorite is replacing the Western subor-
dination of ethics to reason with principles from Eastern philosophy and
religion), but what remains after this change is still a philosophical system,
in this case based on ethics as first philosophy, developed apart from sci-
entific ecology.
The relationship between environmental ethics and the science of ecol-
ogy is quite clear: science cannot provide an ethics unto itself, only facts,
which much be situated within some philosophical normative system that
in itself is developed apart from ecology. This clean separation of fact and
value is an instance of what Husserl called the “natural attitude,” a phrase
that already points to the complications philosophy runs into with this
word—“nature.” Yet, by bracketing the natural attitude, phenomenological
thinkers have tried to think at a level more fundamental than the ought/
is distinction and thereby create a fuller environmental philosophy. Yet,
the question remains: Is this form of thought ecological? What boundaries
does it draw between itself and science? Phenomenological environmental
philosophy still does not draw on scientific ecology out of fear of the natu-
ral attitude, but without asking if ecology unified with philosophy can
provide a stronger thought outside of the natural attitude.
While these two strains of philosophical thought, mainstream environ-
mental ethics and phenomenological environmental philosophy, are the
dominant forms of philosophy and ecology there are some other resources
for thinking about the relationship between the science of ecology and
philosophy further afield. These thinkers do not call themselves environ-
mental philosophers, but are instead concerned with nature as understood
through the philosophy of nature. This resurgence of interest in the phi-
losophy of nature has included a renewed philosophical interaction with
physics or scientific cosmology and thus offers us another example of the
relationship philosophy may take toward science in its attempt to think
nature (understood as a first name of the Real). Here the problem of phi-
losophy’s relation to science remains. Does philosophy’s understanding of
nature change in an engagement with science or is nature still thought of
primarily in a philosophical register? Furthermore, is there a theory of the
relation between philosophy and a science other than physics?
Ethics and Ecology
Normally, owing in part to the “economics of thought,” academic philo-

sophical discourse operates via sharp distinctions between various philo-
sophical domains. In order to be marketable the philosopher must advertise
their areas of specialization and so one will either do “ethics” or “meta-
physics” and in the interest of maintaining the distinctive character of
their specialization they will impose this separation on reality itself as pre-
sented through their philosophical thought. Thus, you find in mainstream
Anglophone philosophers, sometimes referred to by the anachronistic term
“analytic philosophers,” that ecology is still brought before philosophy and
asked to reveal its ethical status. However, ecology presents certain chal-
lenges to these kinds of philosophical scissions, for the ontological status
of an ecosystem and the ethical demand arising from its existence are not
easily separable. Hence, Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” brings together the
ontological and the ethical as Paul W. Taylor describes it, “The very struc-
ture and functioning of the Earth’s ecosystems, it is said, make known
to us the proper relationships that should hold between ourselves and the
natural world. [ . . . ] The conclusion drawn from these considerations is that
the science of ecology provides us with a model to follow in the domain of
environmental ethics.”2 As a philosopher, though, Taylor rejects not just
Philosophy and Ecology 29
the specifics of Leopold’s land ethic, but the very merging of the ethical and
the ontological for breaking certain philosophical rules writing, “This line
of reasoning is not sound from a logical point of view. It confuses fact and
value, ‘is’ and ‘ought.’”3 He goes on to say that ecology, as a special branch
of biology, can only provide facts that have to be taken into account when
one philosophizes about the proper way to live within the physical limits
for survival that those facts set. He goes so far as to claim, “Nothing in
ecology, for example, can tell us that it is wrong to have a wholly exploit-
ative attitude towards nature.”4 In other words, translated into terms famil-
iar to readers of Heidegger, Taylor is making the claim that science does
not think, in this case it does not think ethically. Philosophy must come
alongside it and think for it ethically, even though, in the case of Leopold,
you have a scientific thought and an ethical thought coming together in a
unified manner, while in the case of Taylor’s implicit metaphilosophy you
have two modes of thought that are at war, or at the very least not at peace,
with one another. The particular form this takes in Taylor is common
to mainstream environmental philosophy insofar as it centers on certain
philosophical problems, like the relationship of an “ought” to an “is,” and
takes these as problems that float around scientific ecology’s relationship
to ethics.
It is telling that in Taylor’s development of a theory of environmental
ethics he does not engage in a deep way with ecological concepts. Perhaps,
one might suggest, Taylor constructs such a limit to philosophy and sci-
ence owing to this philosophical commitment to a separation between
ontology and ethics. Such a notion should be able to be tested by consider-
ing a philosophy that rejects this separation. One philosophy that appears
not to suffer so acutely from this same separation of the ethical and the
ontological and metaphysical is the deep ecology or ecosophy of Arne
Naess, perhaps owing to the influence of Spinoza on his own work.5 He
recognizes that “one’s ethics in environmental questions are based largely
on how one sees reality” and thus holds that it is “important in the phi-
losophy of environmentalism to move from ethics to ontology and back.”6
Yet, though this would seem to place it at odds with Taylor’s strict separa-
tion of the ontological and the ethical, we find that both have the same
limit-structure with regards to its practice and relationship to science. The
notion of a deep ecology would appear to suggest that Naess’s philoso-
phy is developed alongside concepts from scientific ecology, yet Naess’s
real hope is to move from ecology to ecosophy. Ecology doesn’t appear
to set the agenda for the philosopher, but instead provides, as it so often
does, a litany of facts about the destructive power of contemporary human
society on the wider nonhuman world. Rather than challenge philosophy
with ecology, as we aim, Naess provides philosophy and ecology with a
model that will be taken up by a plethora of environmental philosophers:

Western philosophy, along with its complicity in the “so-called scientific
worldview,” is to be challenged with Eastern philosophy.7 Naess doesn’t do
this in some naive sense, he isn’t trading in a vulgar exoticism, but when
it comes to concepts that he finds problematic in the Western philosophi-
cal tradition, such as the divide between objective and subjective qualities
or the particular dominant form the concept of the self has, he draws on
resources from the Eastern tradition combined with his own philosophical
project rather than drawing on scientific ecology.
This is especially strange since he recognizes that ecology “has applica-
tion to and overlaps with the problems of philosophy.”8 So what is it that
keeps Naess from engaging deeply with ecological concepts? The answer
is that ecology as a science is suspect precisely because it is a science; it
operates with the suffix -logy rather than -sophy. Within Naess’s ecosophy
science must controlled, including ecology, science must be placed within
a normative, that is, philosophical, milieu that limits its power, or as Naess
would rather say, that recognizes the limits of its power. The impetus
behind this ecosophical reigning in of science is similar to an axiom that I
am working from; namely, that Real, or nature as a first name, resists any
total capture. Naess recognizes this resistance in his own way but unlike
our project uses it to critique the post-Galilean scientific worldview, claim-
ing that we must resist any kind of universalization of one science, be it
biologism or ecologism, which also serves to weaken the science’s internal
identity by generalizing its concepts too much.9 In part this is because, for
Naess, scientific ecology like all natural sciences engenders an understand-
ing of nature that is too disjointed. He even goes on to claim that such a
relationship between philosophy and ecology would favor a shallow eco-
logical movement.10
What then are the limits to scientific ecology, which Naess thinks
are necessary to engender a “profound” understanding of nature that
undergirds a deep ecology? Against ecologism, the overgeneralization of
concepts from ecology understood simplistically, we can locate an eco-
logical minimalism at work in Naess’s ecosophy. We may even call this
minimalism shallow ecologism, as it refuses a deep engagement with sci-
entific ecology. This is operative in Naess’s definition of ecology: “The
expression ‘ecology’ is infused with many meanings. Here, it will mean
the interdisciplinary scientific study of the living conditions of organism
in interaction with each other and with the surroundings, organic as well
as inorganic. For these surroundings the terms ‘milieu’ and ‘environment’
will be used nearly interchangeably.”11 This isn’t a bad definition of ecol-
ogy; in fact, it is quite close to the generally accepted definition given
in Michael Allaby’s A Dictionary of Ecology, which states, “The scientific
study of the inter-relationships among organisms and between organisms,

and between them and all aspects, living and non-living, of their environ-
ment.” However, it doesn’t delve into ecology’s concepts with any depth
either. Even the concepts it touches upon, “organisms” (populations, or
the diversity of species that populate the ecosystem), “living conditions”
(what we call the never-living space and temporality of the environment),
“interaction” (energy relations of exchange that arise out of the populations
interaction with one another), and “environment/milieu” (ecosystem), are
not explored in any depth in relation to philosophical issues.
This lack of depth is likely because Naess thinks that the science of
ecology only provides us with a recognition of our severely limited eco-
logical knowledge, and ecology tells us that we don’t yet understand the
ecological consequences of change in a particular ecosystem: “The study
of ecosystems makes us conscious of our ignorance.”12 Indeed, the only
truly positive notion that Naess appears to take from ecology is the idea
that “all things hang together,” which he takes to be an ontological state-
ment that is ethically significant.13 Yet, Naess points out that this does not
in itself explain how all things hang together, but instead of turning to the
very things that ecology is precisely not ignorant about he turns to another
philosophy (Gestalt thinking).14
But ecology could provide resources for understanding how things hang
together because it is not ignorant of the aspects mentioned earlier (biodi-
versity, energy exchange, the spatial borders of an ecosystem, etc.); ecology
has developed a number of tools for understanding the various ecosystems
and the wider biosphere. So what exactly is Naess referring to by claiming
that ecology reveals our ignorance? Naess says that this has to do with a
kind of political usefulness. No longer can politicians appeal to science or
instrumental reason to deal with pressing issues; cost-benefit analyses will
no longer be a substitute for wisdom.15 If this were the case it would be
laudable, but there is a slightly more nefarious effect of Naess’s presenta-
tion of ecology, one that we will see mirrored in other philosophical think-
ers as well. In short, Naess is claiming like Taylor, as discussed earlier, that
science, and ecology specifically, does not think. That only philosophy, in
the guise of ecosophy, can provide the framework to make any practical
sense of the statements of ecology. In a statement remarkably similar to the
problematic position of Taylor outlined, Naess writes, “Without an ecoso-
phy, ecology can provide no principles for acting, no motive for political
and individual efforts.”16 Again we are left with a split in reality between
what we know is and what we think we ought to do.
In a strange way, then, Naess is actually accepting the arrangement of
philosophy and science that is unecological within thought. Not only does
Naess not draw on scientific ecology to challenge and push philosophy
on problems inherent to it and related to environmental issues, he also

doesn’t attempt to mutate directly what he takes to be science’s underlying
philosophical split between primary and secondary qualities and objective
and subjective reality. Rather, he continues the typical relationship of sci-
ence and philosophy: philosophy over a science that does not think. At one
point referring to the scientific study of the environment he asks sarcasti-
cally, “Are we getting any closer with the long scientific strides built upon
the work of Galileo or Newton?”17 If the goal of a deep ecology move-
ment was to turn the tide of environmental destruction by fostering an
ecosophy, can we not turn this question back on Naess? Are we getting any
closer to an ecosophical relationship with the biosphere with the strides
built upon the work of Naess? While, as with all the philosophers outlined
in this chapter, there is much of value in Naess’s work, the relationship of
philosophy and ecology remains in itself unecological, even unecosophical,
and that means that the very form of his thought remains largely trapped
in the self-sufficiency of a philosophical form of thinking that sets itself up
to remain unchallenged by the form of ecological thought.
Phenomenology and Ecology
Naess recognizes that a true ecosophy cannot separate the ethical and the
ontological as strictly as Taylor, though he organizes ecosophy along a sim-
ilar structure such that the science of ecology is, like an “ought,” unable
to provide any principles for action. We find the same general structure of
science requiring a philosophy purified of its scientific deviations at work
in the phenomenological tradition, while providing a philosophy that is,
ironically given Naess’s aims, more “lived” or “everyday” than ecosophy.
Rather than proceeding from norms, that is, from what “ought,” phenom-
enology proceeds from the thing itself, from the essence of what appears
to us because these norms are already suspect as developing within the
natural attitude. The natural attitude names that particular way of think-
ing that we take as given, but that, if we begin to think critically about the
structures of our thought, appears instead as just a frame of reference or
meaning within a wider pregiven horizon that Husserl calls the life-world.
In this section I’ll consider the underlying structure of phenomenology’s
relationship to science as it is developed in Husserl, which is defined by the
“crisis of the sciences,” and how that is developed by the environmental
phenomenology of John Llewelyn. What will be common to all, though,
is the submission of science to phenomenology, to a form of philosophy
developed necessarily apart from science.
In the contemporary world of philosophy many hold the opinion that

phenomenology’s relationship to science was and remains antagonistic,
that it seeks to undercut the power of science and/or that it ultimately
fosters a nefarious and pathetic agnosticism in its rejection of classi-
cal metaphysics.18 In reality, though, this harsh view of phenomenology
ignores the nuance of phenomenology’s relationship to science, at least as
is found in the writings of its founder Edmund Husserl. Husserl rejected
a certain philosophy of science that he saw at work in European human
society. This he called the positivistic reduction of science, where science
merely provided facts. This philosophy of science should sound familiar
as we found it at work in our survey of mainstream environmental ethics
mentioned earlier. This limiting of the meaning of science to the “fac-
tual sciences,” or rather simply to those aspects of the sciences that are
concerned with uncovering facts, is what is of concern for Husserl. His
engagement with science, then, “concerns not the scientific character of
the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant
and could mean for human existence.”19 The crisis of the sciences, then, is
actually a crisis of human existence because “[m]erely fact-minded sciences
make merely fact-minded people.”20 While the nihilist philosophy of Ray
Brassier, which boldly declares that we are “already dead,” may still have
a problem with Husserl’s attempt to subsume science into the realm of
philosophical meaning, Husserl’s philosophy does not take aim at science
as such but at the unacknowledged philosophical commitments at work
in people’s understanding of science, what we may also call ideology.21
No, the problem is not that Husserl fears science or can’t bring himself
to reconcile his beliefs with some empirical facts that, we are told, stand
opposed to his beliefs, but rather that his philosophy remains untouched
by concepts derived from science. He still sets up a hard boundary between
what science says in its everyday practice, what its axiomatic concepts are,
and the meaning that philosophy can provide, which can hedge in what
we now call “Big Science.”
Husserl’s claim is that the life-world is “dressed up” in the notions
of mathematics that are absolutized, and though this leads to discover-
ies Husserl considers important, these notions ultimately confuse “true
being [for] what is actually a method.”22 What science requires, because
science is in crisis, according to Husserl, is a philosophy that remembers
the life-world, which is its “meaning-fundament.”23 That is to say that the
natural sciences remain naive without any kind of fundamental inquiry
into the very life of things, without questioning that there is in fact a life
of things, or in Heidegger’s terms, without a fundamental inquiry into
what the Being of beings is, what thinking is, and so on.24 The natural sci-
ences, Husserl claims, need to be returned to this life-world or risk losing
it; indeed, losing life itself. Husserl’s solution to this problem is locating an
anonymous, transcendental subjectivity that is “functioning in all experi-
encing, all thinking, all life, thus everywhere inseparably involved,” but
that itself has “never been grasped and understood.”25 How he gets to that
transcendental subjectivity, however, is what is ingenious in Husserl. Notice
that he accuses science divorced from the life-world as being naive.26 Yet,
the solution to that naivety is to plunge into it intentionally, whereas before
one simply acted in it. This may become clearer if one considers this in
light of Plato’s familiar cave myth. There we have the prisoners, chained to
a wall since birth and made to watch shadows of people, animals, and the
like dance on the wall of the cave. This is their only frame of reference so
that they take, completely naturally, these shadows as truth. When one of
the prisoners escapes, whether through accident or intention, and emerges
into the “real world,” he begins to see things as they really are or, at least,
as more real than they are in the cave. Husserl, though, sees no reason to
leave the cave. In fact, we have every reason to question the notion that
outside the cave is the “real world.” What is outside the cave is just the
world beyond the cave, the cave itself is part of the real world, as are the
materials in the cave that hold the prisoners to the wall and the materials
for projecting the shadows upon the wall. No, what the usual telling of
Plato’s myth serves to do is provide a cover for a more insidious cave. If
we consider this in the Hollywood terms of the twentieth-century’s film
version of this myth, Lana and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix, it would be
as if there was a matrix inside the matrix. So when Neo takes the red pill
he simply enters into another version of the matrix, one that chains him
ever more for his having thought that he escaped illusion. Indeed, this set
of problems is presented cinematically in the 2010 film Inception directed
by Christopher Nolan.
Husserl’s radical step is to perform an epochē, what is also called the
reduction or bracketing, on what appears. Eugen Fink, one of Husserl’s
closest students and an assistant on many of Husserl’s most important
projects, including the Crisis, describes the epochē as a radical new begin-
ning for thought. “The de-absolutizing of the world (which in the natural
attitude is absolutized ) signifies a more radical ‘Copernican revolution’
than the conversion from a geocentric to a heliocentric system—one more
radical than all the philosophical revolution in world outlook which takes
place on the basis of the natural attitude.”27 There is something radical
within Husserl’s thought, a radicality that is perhaps not available to us
now after the institutionalization of phenomenology. Yet, what Husserl’s
epochē did was take away the whole world from us, though of course he
did so in order to bring it back, but bring it back under new conditions, as
a phenomenon constituted by an anonymous transcendental subjectivity.
There is a two-step approach to the radical or transcendental epochē. First

there is the epochē of objective science, bracketing all the inherent philo-
sophical notions that plague scientific thought: “What is meant is rather
an epochē of all participation in the cognitions of the objective sciences,
an epochē of any critical position-taking which is interested in their truth
or falsity, even any position on their guiding idea of an objective knowl-
edge of the world.”28 This, though, is not enough for Husserl. It retains
too much still of the natural attitude; those opinions that persist outside
science and that may be more pernicious than the quest for objectivity.
“What is required, then, is a total transformation of attitude, a completely
unique, universal epochē.”29
Fink describes this aspect of the reduction, which takes thought down
to its meontic absolute—bare life itself:
The self-reflection of the phenomenological reduction is not a radicality that

is within human reach; it does not lie at all within the horizon of human
possibilities. Rather, in the actualizing of the reduction a self-reflection
occurs that has a wholly new kind of structure: it is not that man reflectively
thinks about himself, but rather that transcendental subjectivity, concealed
in self-objectivation as man, reflectively thinks about itself, beginning seem-
ingly as man, annulling itself as man, and taking itself down as man all the
way to the ground, namely, down to the innermost ground of its life.30
Where we stand, then, in this transcendental epochē is above the world,

above the validity of the pregivenness of the world.31 This transcendental
stance is above the flux of the world, above the subjective-individual con-
sciousness and intersubjective consciousness. This “unnatural attitude,”
transcendental to the world, bestows on the philosopher a position above
worldly interest:
Any interest in the being, actuality, or nonbeing of the world, i.e., any
interest theoretically oriented toward knowledge of the world, and even any
interest which is practical in the usual sense, with its dependence on the
presuppositions of its situation truths, is forbidden; this applies not only to
the pursuit, for ourselves, of our own interests (we who are philosophizing)
but also to any participation in the interests of our fellow men—for in this
case we would still be interested indirectly in existing actuality.32
In a certain way the epochē is but a deepening of the scientific approach to

thinking. The description of the philosopher who has undergone this tran-
scendental epochē is not far off from the description of the scientist uncon-
cerned with the consequences of his actions for the rest of humanity, he
simply wants to know. Think of the scientists involved in the Manhattan
project, who did not know what the effect of the atomic bomb would be,
but who went out to the desert, put on the their goggles, and detonated it to
find out. They did this knowing that one possible scenario could have been
the complete destruction of the atmosphere, meaning the complete anni-
hilation of all life on earth. But, though Husserl’s description is far from
the nostalgic gatekeeper of meaning that he is presented as by Brassier and
others, it does share certain less dramatic qualities with science. Consider
again ecology, where after the failures of chaining ecological science to
pre-ecological philosophical images of natures, it tended to consider the
ecosystem simply as it appears. Instead of approaching the ecosystem with
an aura of metaphysical presuppositions, presuppositions that unlike the
physicist the ecologist isn’t allowed because of the inherent complexity of
an actual object, the ecologist approaches the ecosystem naively with only
a handful of axiomatic concepts that can be revised on the basis of the
“presentation” of the object. Husserl’s philosophy attempted to do the same
thing within the field of philosophy. Throwing off the failures of meta-
physics, not to encourage some agnosticism, but to truly engage the reality
of things. Our goal, as it has been throughout this chapter, is not to assess
the success of that attempt, but only to trace philosophy’s self-constructed
limits with regard to science. In that regard it is telling that Husserl’s dis-
cussion of transcendental subjectivity, a life that runs through things, has
nothing to do with the way that science thinks life. In fact, science is now
treated on this subject antagonistically in the Crisis. We can see this clearly
when Husserl writes:
The radical consideration of the world is the systematic and purely internal
consideration of subjectivity which “expresses” itself in the exterior. It is
like the unity of a living organism, which one can certainly consider and
dissect from the outside but which one can understand only if one goes
back to its hidden roots and systematically pursues the life which, in all its
accomplishments, is in them and strives upward from them, shaping from
within.33
At the far end of the phenomenological tradition this line of thought ends
with the philosophy of Michel Henry, who has no room at all for sci-
ence in his philosophy and instead delivers his own condemnation of the
Galilean sciences writing, “In its inaugural decision, having placed sensible
life, phenomenological life in general outside its field of study, Galilean
science would assuredly not be able to discover it again through research,
even though it calls itself biology.”34 After quoting the words of Nobel
laureate François Jacob, “Biologists no longer study life today,” Henry goes
on to declaim, “We must take [biology] at its word: in biology there is not
life; there are only algorithms.”35 In distinction to Henry, Husserl spends
most of his Crisis examining the philosophy of objectivism that philoso-
phers fall prey to, rather than engaging in polemic against the sciences as
such. The notion of being “scientific” for philosophers is the equivalent
of taking the red pill, falling into a second matrix, but falling deeper into
illusion for thinking you have escaped it: “Thus nowhere is the temptation
so great to slide into logical aporetics and disputation, priding oneself on
one’s scientific discipline, while the actual substratum of the work, the
phenomena themselves, is forever lost from view.”36
While clearly for Husserl the separation of life from biological life, or
science from the life-world, is not an error or failure of science as such, but
rather one of a certain philosophical way of thinking that pervades science,
we still see in the block quote earlier a skepticism toward science provid-
ing any specific tools for understanding this transcendental subjectivity.
How Husserl submits science to philosophy is far more interesting than
those philosophies discussed earlier, even if the general structure remains
the same. Husserl takes a certain scientific attitude toward the world,
naivety, and radicalizes it. We must still come before the world with our
metaphysical presuppositions bracketed, and even more radically bracket
the whole notion of world; so must science in such a way that it must be
placed within a new philosophical milieu before it can operate outside of
a permanent crisis. That is, only as a philosopher under a transcendental
epochē can one say with Husserl, “I stand above the world, which has now
become for me, in a quite peculiar sense a phenomenon.”37 In this way, sci-
ence is both prized and distrusted. How, though, does this work itself out
in relation to ecology?
Despite phenomenology’s abiding interest in nature, it would be unfair
to expect an explicitly ecologically informed phenomenology from think-
ers like Husserl or Heidegger. Now in the age of ecological crisis, however,
it is unsurprising to find phenomenologists engaging environmental prob-
lems. Yet, of the many books published, few environmental philosophers
take up the radical stance of Husserl’s return to the things themselves but
instead produce studies of past phenomenologists’ considerations of nature
and the environment, sometimes putting them into their historical context
and sometimes suggesting aspects that might be of use to addressing our
current situation.38 One notable exception is the Welsh phenomenologist
John Llewelyn, whose two books of ecophenomenology, The Middle Voice
of Ecological Conscience (1991) and Seeing through God: A Geophenomenology
(2004), remain the deepest phenomenological engagement with environ-
mental thought.39 In both books Llewelyn takes this radical notion of a
transcendental subjectivity, as ethically reworked by Emmanuel Levinas,

and considers how it challenges certain utilitarian environmental ethics,
like those advocated by Peter Singer, and what this stance above worldly
interests would mean for environmental philosophy. In so doing Llewelyn
argues that we need to begin looking for a “deeper and wider ecology”
alongside a “morally deep contractualism”40 In other words, if utilitarian
ethics are built on a strong sense of self and self-interest, rationally under-
stood to mean that one’s self-interest is always in some sense intersubjec-
tive, Llewelyn suggests that there is instead a responsibility toward all that
is regardless of what they are.41 While it may not, at first glance, appear
this way, what Llewelyn has done is to put the seemingly morally mon-
strous position of the scientist, willingly to risk all worldly reality to know,
within an ethical framework. The transcendental subject of phenomenol-
ogy is not limited to a human being, it is the transcendental subjectivity
that runs through all that is and it is from this position that one’s worldly
interests slip away, that one’s ego is deabsolutized so that an absolute ego
may be recognized.
Llewelyn interestingly connects this to James Lovelock’s often-
misunderstood Gaia hypothesis. In his reading of Lovelock, better than
most, Llewelyn describes how the Gaia hypothesis performs a similar
deabsolutization of the human world; the world understood through the
natural attitude, writing, “the hypothesis [that Gaia will look after her-
self] bodes well for life in general. But the influence of the biosphere on
the atmosphere is not necessarily good news for life in its human mani-
festation. That thought has at least the salutary effect of leading human
beings to adopt a less anthropocentric perspective.”42 This is an interesting
mutation of phenomenology with quasi-ecological material (the status of
the Gaia hypothesis in the ecological literature is fraught, to say the least,
though some acceptance of its general ideas of coevolution has been appro-
priated) and it could be helpful in a further complication of philosophy
with ecological material.43 However, throughout both Middle Voice and
Seeing through God, this is the only scientific concept engaged with in any
depth and that engagement happens without any wider theoretical consid-
eration of the relationship between an environmental phenomenology and
scientific ecology. So even the most successful engagement with ecology,
at least on our terms, still operates without any deep complication of phi-
losophy with ecology. While Husserl clearly meant that there was a crisis
in the whole of European life, this, along with Heidegger’s own criticism
of the drive toward objectivity in European science, nonetheless, created
a posture of antiscience within phenomenology that persists in environ-
mental phenomenology. Phenomenology, then, remains unecological in
thought.
Philosophies of Nature and

Blindness to Ecology
Among many contemporary philosophers there has been a renewed inter-
est in the philosophy of nature. Unlike the previous forms of philosophy
surveyed earlier these philosophers of nature are largely unconcerned with
creating any kind of environmental philosophy. We are looking to them,
though, because the question that drives this work is not limited to the
sphere of environmental thought, dominated as it is by questions of ethics,
but by the question of an ecological nature, to think nature in an ecological
way that, we hold, has not been done before. Philosophers of nature, then,
offer an alternative model of thinking nature whose boundary between
science and itself will be different than environmental philosophy. Thus,
in this section, we will trace a different form of the limit of science and
philosophy than the previous section, a form that may prove a better model
for science and philosophy, but whose failure to be able to think the ecosys-
tem is demonstrative of our claim that nature is not hidden, but perverse.
That nature cannot be grasped by a single thought, but instead determines
every thought. Again, as with the surveys earlier, this is not intended to be
a comprehensive assessment of the philosophy, but only intended to trace
its limit experience with regard to science and, in this particular case, to
locate in philosophy some resistance to the subsumption model, meaning
that science can only think if it is subsumed into philosophy, which is
common to environmental ethics, deep ecology, and phenomenological
environmental philosophy. In the case of these new philosophies of nature
this resistance is accomplished without thereby becoming a full-blown
scientism.
This renewal of interest in the philosophy of nature is in part a reac-
tion to the twentieth-century critique of metaphysics common in both
the analytic and Continental philosophical worlds. A variety of specu-
lative thinkers, such as Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux, already
mentioned earlier, but also Iain Hamilton Grant and some others, have
captured the imagination of many younger philosophers and theorists in
their call to return to the “great outdoors.”44 In each case these think-
ers engage strongly with the natural sciences: mathematics and cosmology
for Meillassoux, neuroscience for Brassier, and physics for Grant. Unlike
Husserl, these philosophers are unconcerned with any crisis in science, but
instead take science as necessary for philosophical work.
Of these thinkers it is Grant that is concerned most explicitly with the
philosophical problem of nature. His work proceeds much like Deleuze’s
early history of philosophy texts, entering into the discourse of a past
philosopher and pushing it to its limits. For Grant that philosopher is

Schelling, though he engages with the entire constellation of thinkers
known as the German Idealists. The whole of the argument concern-
ing nature can actually be seen in the difference between the Fichtean
and Schellingian systems of philosophy for Grant.45 For Fichte’s under-
standing of nature, containing with it a rejection of nonliving nature, the
splitting of nature and freedom into two different “worlds,” is the com-
mon view of nature among philosophers, which Grant claims have been
practicing an antiphysics for some two hundred years.46 Against Fichte’s
notion that nature is to be understood primarily through animal being,
that is, as an organism, such that “life exhausts nature,” Schelling makes
the argument that nature is also partly living.47 Grant locates Fichte’s error
in the relationship between philosophy and science, while noting that it
was Schelling’s deep engagement with the speculative physics of his age
that allowed him a richer and more consistent philosophy of nature. For
“Fichte’s only error [ . . . ] is to deny activity to nature on transcendental
grounds while rejecting the central precept of dynamic physics [ . . . ] i.e.,
that there is no substance behind the powers.”48 Clearly, for Grant follow-
ing Schelling, the transcendental cannot think alone, for the transcen-
dental is itself constituted by nature, and thus philosophy will always be
bonded to the science of nature, which he claims is physics.
Now, we can begin to see the problem within this model of science
and philosophy if we consider perhaps the most influential contemporary
Schellingian thinker of nature, Slavoj Žižek, who uses Schelling’s philoso-
phy of nature along with contemporary discussions of physics to cast a
vision of nature that is ultimately “not-whole.”49 A nonharmonious vision
of nature that runs afoul of the usual portrayal of nature that, Žižek claims,
is found in environmental thought. Setting aside the fact that Žižek’s por-
trayal of environmental thought appears to be pitched more for contrar-
ian affect than any interesting philosophical purpose, his understanding
of nature via Schelling and physics that is then turned against ecology
as such, which we must also understand as scientific ecology despite his
lack of specificity, is telling of the inherent blindness of these philoso-
phies that take themselves as eternally bonded to physics. For Žižek claims
to be speaking about nature, and as support for his view he appeals to
the philosophy of Schelling, already outlined earlier, and to findings in
contemporary physics.50 Yet, he deploys this against ecology as if ecology
were not itself another science of nature. The incompleteness of nature is
not taken as a challenge to engage with multiple sciences of nature, but
instead taken as a sign that science has caught up to the most brilliant of
philosophies: “Because of this self-reflective character of [quantum phys-
ics’] propositions, [it] joins ranks with Marxism and psychoanalysis as one
of the three types of knowledge which conceives itself not as a neutral

adequate description of its object but as a direct intervention in it.”51 This
is, of course, ridiculous since ecology, in order to describe its object accu-
rately, must account for their own direct engagement with nature and it is
impossible to avoid some intervention in an ecosystem. But, more impor-
tantly, while Žižek and other philosophers of nature following Schelling
do not subsume science into their philosophy, their raising of physics alone
to philosophy’s level still constitutes blindness to the perversity of nature.
Of course, Grant does not share this particularly distasteful aspect
of Žižek’s philosophy of nature. In fact, he provides us with a powerful
thought-experiment that demonstrates the perversity of nature—a
thought-experiment called the “extensity test.”52 For Grant, following
Plato and Schelling, sees philosophy as the universal science and as such
nothing is outside its remit, it must be bold enough to think the All. Like
Schelling he aims to think what philosophy has left unthought, nature, the
unconditioned of thought itself:
[Philosophy] is “the infinite science,” and cannot therefore be “conditioned”

by eliminating anything a priori from its remit [ . . . ]. The infinite science
must test itself against the All, which lacks neither nature nor Idea. It is the
extensity therefore, the range and capacity of philosophical systems that is
being tested [ . . . ]. [Schelling] challenges systems to reveal what they elimi-
nate. Insofar as philosophy still leaves nature to the sciences, it continues
to fail Schelling’s test, and becomes a conditioned, that is, a compromised
antiphysics.53
Insofar as nature lies outside the remit of just one science, can a philoso-
phy of nature ever hope to think nature if it is eternally and necessarily
bonded to but one science, the science of physics? Of course, Grant is not
suggesting that physics as such is the final arbiter of the truth of nature,
indeed his argument is that by separating physics from philosophy it has
failed to live up to its own identity as the infinite science. That in separat-
ing the subject of physics, physis, from philosophy it has left itself blindly
conditioned by nature. A philosophy that is a compromised antiphysics
will always find itself coming up against the chiding of facile naturalism,
and what lies behind the laughter of these naturalist philosophers, who are
of course compromised as well, is what the compromised antiphysics has
left unthought.
The point here is not to say that Grant has left ecology unthought, which
would be rather silly since his work thus far has been a historical study to
set up his own forthcoming project, but to challenge the philosophical
overdetermination of nature, both as an idea and as that which is (though,
in-the-last-instance, these are both nature as One). Grant’s point, following

Schelling, is not a return to physics as such, but to the subject of physics,
physis/nature, a return to what underlies a priori the conditioned within
thought. As Grant says concerning Schelling, though this is equally true
of most philosophers involved in the return to nature, “Schelling always
‘starts with’ naturephilosophy because ‘nature IS a priori.”54 Yet, there is a
temptation at work in the recent turn again to nature to think that a single
science offers us access to some essence of nature that may then be enriched
through a philosophical operation or, as with Brassier, provide the thought
through which all philosophy must be judged. In Grant’s work this plays
out as a development of a philosophy of forces, obviously derived from
physics but rethought within philosophical problematics. Yet, a philosophy
of forces fails the extensity test when it comes to problems related to ecol-
ogy; it simply is too limited to think the complexity of ecological issues
of ecosystem organization, biodiversity, niche construction, and energy
flow.55 This is clear from Žižek’s own engagement between a philosophy
infused with physics, as ecology is denied even access to nature, but this
holds true also with regard to a philosophy that derives only forces from
nature and thinks from there. While that is likely to be valuable, certainly
the challenge put forward to philosophy, that nature exists for it, needs to
be meet by a thousand unified theories of philosophy and science X, rather
than any kind of subsumption of some other science to a unified theory of
philosophy and physics. After all, any attempt to do so will ultimately lead
to failure, for as E. O. Wilson remarks, “Physicists can chart the behavior
of a single particle; they can predict with confidence the interaction of two
particles; they begin to lose it at three and above. Keep in mind that ecol-
ogy is a far more complex subject than physics.”56
The underlying issue here concerns the status of particular sciences,
like physics or ecology, in relation to philosophy. While the limit between
science and philosophy is clear in the approaches outlined earlier, what we
have called the subsumption model, within new philosophies of religion
there is more room for a sharing of material. A model that I am fundamen-
tally in agreement with, but that remains, in my view, unstable because the
idea of science itself remains unthought. In the next chapter, building on
the work of Laruelle, I present a model and theory of science that moves
beyond these problems. But, while thinking through the relationship of
physics to philosophy, the question of physics overdetermination of the
idea of science is raised. Corollary to that question is the need for any bond
between philosophy and ecology, the question of whether or not ecology
is a science.
Lévêque points out that “in the eyes of some people and decision-makers,
and even in the eyes of scientists, ecology is not generally viewed as a
science in the same way as nuclear physics or molecular biology.”57 Some of

these doubts have been founded, for as with any science ecology has had to
respond to its own failures and overdeterminations by unscientific thought,
some of which we outlined in our discussion of ecology and thought. Yet,
the overwhelming reason that ecology is often derided as unscientific is its
inability to test its main concepts and to provide hard laws for ecosystem
functions, at least laws as defined by physics and chemistry. While there
is an absence of laws, there are, as Wilson says, “as in the study of evolu-
tion [ . . . ] principles that can be written in the form of rules or statistical
trends.”58 There can be no hard laws in ecology owing to the complexity of
its object. We can only begin to understand such a complex and perverse
object through heuristic principles, or, in other words, through practical
axioms. Thus, the main concepts of ecology, which are not just concepts
but actual realities or propositions, cannot be falsified in the sense of
Popper’s philosophy of science. Yet, like Žižek’s quantum physics, this is
in part because the reality of ecology, that is, a certain earthly manifesta-
tion of nature, demands that the observer is somehow implicated in the
empirical findings.59
While Lévêque’s hope for a mechanistic account of the ecosystem some-
times leaks out in his account of ecology’s history, and thus also the edges
of a certain faith in mechanistic philosophy peek out as well, the likelihood
of that account sharing much in common with the model of physics is
low. Not because scientists are conspiring against beauty and freedom—
that idea is largely dependent on one’s preunderstanding of beauty and
freedom and has little to do with mechanics as such—but simply because
ecosystems are neither chaotic nor ordered enough to fit such an abstract
understanding of nature. Consider Wilson’s account of ecosystems. He
invites us to think of two different extreme models for how an ecosystem
may be organized with regard to its biodiversity. The first is total disorder;
here species come and go without any strong relationship with the presence
or absence of other species. The second is perfect order; here the ecosystem
itself is just a superorganism and thus if we could just know one species
within the ecosystem we would be able to understand the whole of the
ecosystem without further study of individual populations.60 As remarked
in the earlier discussion of ecology, to be developed more later, ecologists
reject either extreme as a principle for ecological science. Instead, “[t]hey
envision an intermediate form of community organization, something like
this: whether a particular species occurs in a given suitable habitat is largely
due to chance, but for most organisms the chance is strongly affected—the
dice are loaded—by the identity of the species already present.”61 In short,
the manifestation of nature that ecologists study and explain is a com-
plex system containing actualities rather than abstractions and as such it
requires axioms and heuristic concepts, but philosophers of nature should

not run away from complexity least they leave it unthought and, perhaps
more importantly, leave philosophy unchanged by complexity.
Expanding to consider nature in its complexity, using concepts that
have been successful in the scientific study of ecosystems within philo-
sophical problems, as well as on the structure of philosophy itself, is surely
a step forward in terms of meeting the extensity test. For if philosophy has
been bonded eternally and necessarily to physics, would not the philo-
sophical conception of physics, as a philosophy of science, determine its
understanding of nature and in turn lead scientific thought aground if this
conception is misguided? If, after the dominance of Popper’s philosophy
of science, we are beginning to understand that some forms of science
are structurally unable to fit the paradigm of physics, must not the para-
digm of science itself change? We will return to this question in the next
chapter. For now, though, we have demonstrated the perversity of nature
with regard to philosophy’s attempted capture, either through the sub-
sumption model or through the bonded model. Wilson says of ecologists
that they “like the organisms they study, cannot make nature conform to
their perfect liking.”62 This is a lesson for philosophy, one that it would
be wise to take under consideration. In contrast to the structural weak-
nesses in the relationship between science and philosophy and philosophy’s
attempts to think environmentally, ecology may provide a model for how
to think from nature, rather than from a hallucinatory conformism, but
more importantly how to think nature in an ecological way.
Chapter 4
Theology and Ecology
Writing about theology in relation to ecology may seem strange within the
scope of a book that itself stands within no particular religious tradition,
or, more exactly, is unconcerned with its standing within any particular
religious tradition as it aims for a “secularity of thought” within its own
“non-theological” discourse.1 There may even seem to be an air of insin-
cerity or a cynical appeal to the power of a large group present in religious
communities, a group that one may disagree with because they “don’t
know any better” but that can be exploited for the same reason, an atti-
tude present in the appeal of E. O. Wilson to religious believers in his The
Creation (2006).2 There is however an ultimately realist reason for consid-
ering theology within the wider paradigm of “environmental thought”: the
form its thought takes is superior in a specific way to that of philosophy.
Theology is concerned with many of the same questions as philosophy,
and that includes the question of ethics and metaphysics raised by the eco-
logical crisis. However, unlike the environmental philosophies discussed
earlier, the works of ecotheology tend not to separate nearly as easily the
ethical and the metaphysical, even within their own self-understanding of
the discipline; these two strands are always unified within some broader
paradigm, some single, theological vision. As will become apparent in the
next chapter, this prefigures the methodology of non-philosophy; it is akin
to the “vision-in-One” that non-philosophy thinks from. Yet, theology, I
will argue, does not itself break with its own self-sufficiency, it does not
allow itself to be thought ecologically. This is clearest in its interaction
with the science of ecology.
In chapter 1, I say that the limit of theology’s relationship to science is
determined by the absolute subsumption of science into theology, though
this subsumption operates differently than philosophical subsumption
insofar as theology claims to subsume itself into the same vision-in-God

that it would plunge science into. Or, in other words, theology operates
by claiming a certain kind of poverty in its operation; a dependence on
God, which is sometimes radical and sometimes relative depending on the
theologians’ particular understanding of God and World, but importantly
God is never captured by theology (we will return to our understanding
of theology in the next chapter). Therefore within theology we can dif-
ferentiate two different types according to the operation of this subsump-
tion: declension or inflection. The declension type is to be understood as
distinct from what is more commonly referred to as the declension nar-
rative, or rather, the declension narrative exists within a wider posture of
declension toward thought. The narrative is a descriptive tool of the type,
whereas the type itself refers to the imposed limits between theology and
science. While in the previous chapters we treated three different philoso-
phies in relation to their limit-relationship with science, this section will
be briefer for two reasons. First, our aim in part I is primarily to trace the
relationship between philosophy and science/ecology, and theology and
science/ecology. Second, superficially theological understandings of nature
do not differ greatly from philosophical ones, save that theological under-
standings of nature tend to think in terms of creation. This is important,
so I will return to it in part IV, but not in terms of the two different types
I’ve identified (declension and inflection) as both are to be located at the
level of subsumption, which is, on my reading, common to environmental
theology and thus not determinative at the second level.
Declension and Ecology
The declension type is not exclusive to theology. It is, in terms we will

describe at length later, a population-thought that can take on differ-
ent niches in different ecosystems (of) thought. For instance, one finds
this population-thought in Heidegger’s philosophical history of thought,
which holds that Being was discovered by Greek philosophy but was sub-
sequently forgotten. This forgetting of Being lies at the heart of our being
enframed by technology, an enframing that is environmentally unsound.3
Heidegger’s declension narrative has been influential in environmental
philosophy, but with regard to philosophy’s relation to science it exists rela-
tive to the general subsumption model. Its function is to open the question
of Being again. Within theology, the niche of the declension narrative is
to “plant a seed,” it has an apologetic niche, that prepares the reader for
the theologians’ message concerning the right way to live precisely because
Theology and Ecology 47
of the createdness of creation. This witnesses to theology’s thinking meta-

physics and ethics together, a vision-in-God, which is supported because
within the order of creation, even in its postlapsarian form teeming as it is
with violence, one may still see the way that one ought to live.
Of course, I am referring only to theologies that specifically engage
with environmental thought, and theologies like Karl Barth’s lie outside
the discussion here. Despite the recent attempt by Willis Jenkins to use
Barth’s theology within theological environmental ethics, the radical sepa-
ration of theology from the earth, grounded in the transcendence of Jesus
Christ, appears somewhat nihilistic when confronting environmental prob-
lems.4 One may say that Barth’s theology represents an absolute declension
between theology and science, insofar as science is always a science of this
World, and especially a science concerned with the earth. Consider Barth’s
conclusion that the self-revelation of Christ was to humanity specifically
and thus any attempt to build an ethics on the idea of a common concept
of life, somewhat central to ecological thought, within man, beast, and
plant is to be refused: “We must refuse to build either ethics as a whole or
this particular part of ethics [regarding animals] on the view and concept
of a life which embraces man, beast and plant.”5
Strangely, given Barth’s extreme antagonism toward natural theology,
the declension type closest to Barth’s position within environmental theol-
ogy is the modified natural law theology of Michael S. Northcott in his The
Environment and Christian Ethics (1996). Yet, because Northcott affirms
a position closer to Aquinas than Barth, whom he never engages with in
the text, his sense of decline is less radical than Barth’s and can be located
historically. Our “natural knowledge” can be used in the search for divine
truth: “Natural knowledge of truth is available to us because the cosmos
is a realm in which the being of God manifests itself as being-in-action.”6
Thus, for Northcott, the environmental crisis can be responded to through
natural knowledge and that requires a certain engagement with the sci-
ences. Yet, this is a transcendental choice regarding science that remains
unacknowledged in Northcott. This transcendental choice of science calls
on ecology to provide insights into nature and the environmental crisis
in the light of the declension theory already at play in Northcott’s the-
ology.7 Thus, Northcott selects the elements from scientific ecology that
accord with his vision-in-God, that of a conservative and localist politics
that is doctrinally orthodox within a broadly catholic position (compris-
ing shared doctrinal trends between Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and the
Eastern Orthodox). This vision-in-God is at odds with what Northcott
calls “modernity,” a constellation of practices and ideologies that brings
together in a social form “the money economy and industrialism” that
“proved inimical to religion.”8
This constellation of practices was not only inimical to religion, though,

but to the natural or created order (to use the theological terms for this
sense of the word “nature”). Ecology, not unlike in Naess’s description, can
only provide evidence that something has gone badly wrong in the ecosys-
tem, but provides nothing in itself for dealing with the problem identified.
Thus, if we consider Northcott’s transcendental choice and ask what he
draws from ecology, it is nothing more than a litany of statistics relating
to soil erosion, deforestation, climate change, species extinction, and the
dwindling supply of natural resources.9 There would appear to be a kind of
paradox in Northcott’s use of science, for on the one hand it can provide us
with facts regarding the poor health of the biosphere, but on the other hand
science is clearly located negatively within his declension narrative, con-
necting the “scientific method” with one of the primary causes of ecologi-
cal degradation, “industrialism.”10 While a few pages later he does concede
that some recent (at the time) scientific ideas about the holistic, interactive,
and systematic nature of reality appear to have a certain fittingness with
the holistic theological position he is advancing, he does not engage with
them in any depth.11 Then, further into the book, he again turns to science
to provide support for his own advocacy of localism.12 This remains, if not
a paradox, a sign of the project’s metatheological incoherence, as we have
been treated to a long treatise on science’s culpability in the environmental
crisis, suggesting that what is needed is some kind of return to preindus-
trial forms of society, while at the same time employing certain scientific
facts to lend authority to his argument. In no specific way, other than pro-
viding facts about the degradation of the earth, which are then attributed
by Northcott to certain theological (metaphysical/ethical) positions, is the
science of ecology presented as a challenge or spur to thought. As we will
see in part II this isn’t a particular failing of Northcott, but common to
the division of labor between sciences and philosophy found at work in
philosophy’s thinking about itself.
One potential obstruction to any fruitful engagement with ecol-
ogy, or science in general, may lie in his need to absolve his particular
variant of Christianity from any culpability in the environmental crisis.
Northcott’s target here is the popular thesis put forward by Lynn White
that the account of creation in the Christian scriptures is responsible for
the rise of a technological and industrial relationship that is an exploitative
relationship to the rest of nature. Northcott, to the contrary, holds that
“the rise of instrumental views of nature has gone hand in hand with the
demise of the traditional view of creation as the sphere of God’s providen-
tial ordering, and with the gradual secularization of European civiliza-
tion which began at the close of the Middle Ages and reaches its nadir
in secularized modernity.”13 Northcott puts forward this thesis while at
the same time arguing that the modern understanding of science arises
out of Christian nominalists, rather than what he takes to be the much
richer theology explicated by earlier Medieval theologians such as Aquinas
and Augustine.14 Again, we see the transcendental choice at work here. In
one breath, Christianity is absolved of crimes against nature by referring
to Christianity’s varied form, and science is linked to deficient forms of
Christian theology.
It is possible to confuse the difference in number of theologians dis-
cussed under the declension type to that of the inflection type, one envi-
ronmental theologian to three in the next section, with a comment on the
relative influence of each type within religious communities. The reality,
though, is quite different as the relative declension model discussed earlier
is found in the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church as outlined
in Pope Benedict XVI’s “In the Beginning . . . ”: A Catholic Understanding
of the Story of Creation and the Fall, written when he was then Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, and in his third encyclical, Caritas in veritate, outlin-
ing Roman Catholic social teaching. In the encyclical he sums up Roman
Catholic social teaching regarding ecology in this way:
The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that

shapes human coexistence: when “ human ecology” is respected within society,
environmental ecology also benefits. Just as human virtues are interrelated,
such that the weakening of one places others at risk, so the ecological sys-
tem is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society
and its good relationship with nature. In order to protect nature, it is not
enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an
apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive
issue is the overall moral tenor of society.15
All the elements of the declension model are present here: an overall sub-
sumption of science into the theological vision, an appeal to the real dete-
rioration of the biosphere or nature, and finally an appeal not to science, or
other seemingly rational forms of thought such as economic planning, but
to the renewal of human society, what Benedict calls “overall moral tenor,”
brought about through a return to a premodern organization of thought.
Benedict’s dismissal of science as a partner in the forming of theological
thought is, if not explicit throughout the rest of the encyclical, implicit in
his unecological splitting of “human ecology” and “environmental ecol-
ogy,” advocating some kind of strange “trickle down ecologics” whereby
if we simply respect nature certain environmentally harmful aspects of
our dwelling on the earth will, the text suggests, be alleviated or disap-
pear altogether. Never mind that part that says an ecologically informed
response to our current untenable form of life is the encouragement of
family planning, including sexual education and birth control, ideas that
go explicitly against Roman Catholic social teaching.
In short, because science is taken as fallen it isn’t even suitable as a
conversation partner beyond its being a sign of human fallenness. As we
saw with Northcott, the reader is asked to accept the varied forms that
Christian theology may take without any recognition of the varied prac-
tices at work in science. And again there is no sense that science could even
challenge theology, that, even if it is historically correct that it arises from
nominalism, it could creatively respond to the shortcomings of nominal-
ism. Thus, in the declension type, the subsumption of science is a com-
plete disempowering of science to challenge theology in any way, except to
respond to the environmental crisis as theology. That is to say, it responds
as theology bonded to its own circularity.
Inflection and Ecology
On the whole the inflection model engages with a science understood

in a more positive manner. If the declension model signals the decline
of science outside of its subsumption in a strong theological framework,
the inflection model identifies a more thoroughgoing decline in human
thought. This means that the desire to absolve Christianity of responsibil-
ity in the environmental crisis is distinctly absent in the work of those I’ve
grouped under the inflection model, but rather this decline is taken as an
opportunity to bring together the best of science and the best of theology
in a new theological thought. Thus, science and theology get inflected
within a new theology, rather than set within a general notion of decline.
So, the declension narrative is present in the inflection type, but it has a
weak influence on the overall relationship theology takes toward science,
whereas it is strongly determinate within the declension type. The form of
the declension narrative varies though within the figures we will survey
here. For instance, in Sallie McFague it is, as it was in Northcott, a prob-
lem of a worldview she locates in a “picture [of reality],” which “was a posi-
tivistic, dualistic, atomistic one that forced both God and human beings
out of the natural world and into an increasingly narrow, inner one.”16
Also sharing in this weakened declension narrative is the work of libera-
tion theologian Leonardo Boff, who locates the crisis in the “paradigm” of
“unlimited growth,” a paradigm that both state socialism and capitalism
perpetuated “undermining [ . . . ] the basis of wealth, which is always the
Earth and its resources” as well as “human labour.”17 Rosemary Radford
Ruether, despite the feminist orientation shared with McFague, is a bit
more radical in that she both recognizes the lack of any “golden age” from
which decline could be located and locates the underlying problem within
thought further back than McFague, and thus further entrenched in our
culture, in the way dominant global cultures “have construed the idea of
the male monotheistic God” and the subsequent “relation of this God to
the cosmos as its Creator.”18 This construction of God and the relation-
ship reality has with God has had the effect of “reinfor[ing] symbolically
the relations of domination of men over women, masters over slaves, and
(male ruling-class) humans over animals and over the earth.”19 While I
identify more closely with this model, ultimately the relationship between
theology, as one regional knowledge, and ecology, as one scientific regional
knowledge, remains overdetermined by the identity of theology and its
own circularity.
Ultimately the theologians grouped under the inflection type hold that
science provides a valuable and necessary dialogue partner for theology.
However, their understanding of how that dialogue works differs greatly.
For instance, while McFague sees promise in some contemporary cos-
mological and biological theories that emphasize a cosmic life to things,
she also holds that the earlier “picture of reality” also had, and contin-
ues to have, scientific supporters.20 There is a certain incoherence to her
understanding of the relationship of theology and science, for while she
sees within certain strands support for “the organic model,” a model she
believes fits well with a theological statement that the world is the body of
God, that God suffers in the making poor of the world, she has no reason
for thinking this statement will remain theologically or scientifically valid.
Or indeed, as could be argued, why that lack of future validity may not
be necessary. She thus provides no metatheology, no criteria for why this
aspect of science can be used as a resource for theology. This is symptom-
atically important since the book bases much of its positive project on a
model of the relationship between God and World (as one Body) that she
says “is [ . . . ] in keeping with the view of reality coming to us from con-
temporary science.”21 Why is it that the science of ecology is only used as
a resource in relation to the facts it gives us about ecological degradation?
Her own lack of attention given to ecological science is evident in her privi-
leging of the idea of wilderness present in her view that as mostly urban
dwellers we no longer know “wilderness as a yardstick,” the idea being that
we no longer know how nature really is or that we lack “a measure of how
we have changed the world.”22 Wilderness is not an ecological concept,
but a philosophical one, for the city is an ecosystem too, and often can be
understood as a viable one at that.
McFague seems less interested in engaging specifically with ecology
so much as she’s interested in thinking theology in the light of a new
cosmology, a characteristic that McFague shares with Ruether, as they both

tend to draw on physicists who have tried to bridge the divide between
religion and science like Fritjof Capra. We find here something familiar,
something that we saw already in our survey of the philosophers of nature,
for what attracts these theologians to the new physics is the way in which
the subject/object split is broken down, where hard dualisms are rendered
inoperative and harmful for scientific inquiry rather than the prerequisite.
“Rather than assuming a standpoint outside of and unrelated to reality,
from which ‘objective’ knowledge is possible, the observer is an integral
part of the reality observed. This means one also cannot abstract fact from
value.”23 So, it is because there is now a science available to these theolo-
gians that accords generally with its own understanding of reality, a world
that can’t be split up into discrete facts but is as a whole creation, which
allows them to engage fruitfully with science. For a good theology to arise
out of an accommodation of science, science first had to come to become
good science, so to speak.
Yet, this itself bespeaks an underlying desire to continue to address
philosophical and theological issues by way of philosophical and theologi-
cal means. There is a kind of “shallow (theological) ecologism” at work
here, to draw on a form of shallow ecologism mentioned earlier. Ecologism,
again, referring to the use of ecological concepts, simplistically understood,
to support an argument for a particular theological viewpoint. The term
is usually referred to negatively, but the underlying assumption behind the
term is that the ecological concepts used are simplistically understood and
that is certainly borne out in the texts of Ruether and McFague (as well as
Northcott). For instance, and perhaps being an early indicator of this shal-
low ecologism, is the constant reference to the Gaia hypothesis of James
Lovelock without any discussion of the subsequent debates in scientific
ecology.24 Yet, more telling is that the inflection model doesn’t present
much more of ecology than the declension model did. For the declen-
sion model ecology could only give us facts about the degradation of the
biosphere and give strong evidence that humanity is guilty of causing this
degradation. In the inflection model we do get a positive understanding
of ecology, namely, one connected to the holistic and relational picture of
the cosmos given by the new physics and summed up by Leonardo Boff
this way:
Consequently, the basic concept of nature seen from an ecological stand-

point is that everything is related to everything else in all respects. A slug
on the roadway is related to the most distant galaxy. A flower is related to
the great explosion fifteen billion years ago. The carbon monoxide in the
exhaust gases from a bus is related to our Milky Way. My own conscious-
ness is related to elementary particles.25
However, this positive understanding of ecology is rather thin and is not

an exclusive insight into ecology, as the constant reference to the new
physics shows. What remains constant, though, is the sense that ecology
is generally a pessimistic science, a science to be used in the same way
prosecutors use forensic science in their prosecution of accused offenders.
While throughout the texts there are constant references to the culpability
of human beings in the environmental crisis nowhere is this prosecution
clearer than in Ruether’s description of the historical development of ecol-
ogy: “Thus ecology, in the expanded sense of a combined socioeconomic
and biological science, emerged in the last several decades to examine how
human misuse of ‘nature’ is causing pollution of soils, water, and air, and
the destruction of plant and animal communities, thereby threatening the
base of life upon which the human species itself depends.”26 This suggests
a very shallow understanding of the history of ecology and, of the theolo-
gians addressed in this chapter, only Boff even takes the time to outline the
specific history of ecology.27
Now, of course, ecology has provided valuable evidence of anthropo-
genic climate change and helped to identify the harmful effects of indus-
trialization on specific ecosystems, but to reduce the whole of the science
to a science of prosecution belies an overall shallow approach to ecol-
ogy. While these theologians, in distinction to Northcott and Benedict,
are willing to change their understanding of God on the basis of new
cosmologies, they don’t blend with ecology in the same way.28 There is
then a common problem of a shallow ecologism at work in both theo-
logical models. In the declension type, as represented by Northcott’s
work, there appears to be no recognition of the varied practice of science,
nor is there a separation between the transcendental practice of science
and the various controversies, theories, findings, and so forth that con-
stitute the day-to-day life of the various sciences. While those grouped
under the inflection type appear to recognize the historical positioning
of the sciences, they do not use the science of ecology to think through
their theological model for the proper relation of World/humanity and
God, focusing instead on possibilities opened up by the new physics for
a new dialogue between science and theology. While Northcott con-
stantly contrasted the decline brought on with modernity with “ortho-
dox Christianity,” those in the inflection type feel the need for Christian
self-criticism. There is no real difference here, though, as Northcott’s crit-
icism of nominalist theology is formally the same as McFague’s criticism,
to take one example, of theology’s disrespect for the body in its major
traditions. For Northcott, who expands the declension narrative, and
McFague, who allows a place in her ecotheology still for a strong declen-
sion narrative, and even in Ruether, who rejects the idea that there is some
prior good state from which a decline began, we still find an eschewing
of technology (not unlike Heidegger) as well as the urban, laying much of
the ecological blame for climate change on the lifestyles of urban dwell-
ers, even though there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that we could
continue to have an urban society, and that the required asceticism need
not take a localist bent, but may actually require a closer, more urban liv-
ing situation that involves a great deal less meat eating. This, however, is
a practical argument that does not bear directly on the problem here, it
being my own instance of a “transcendental choice” that requires a greater
theory of the “organon of selection” that undergirds the circular rigor of
the work, which I will discuss in part III. I bring up urban ecology here
only to highlight that neither theologian has internalized the ecological
outlook, for they are not even able to see that the city is an ecosystem,
that there is no coherent or meaningful discussion of wilderness (unless
one wants to go back millennia, but few are brave enough to push their
declension narratives that far), of a biosphere where humanity isn’t part
of the ecosystem.
Boff perhaps provides the best theology within the inflection type in
terms of coming closest to a unified theory of theology and ecology. This
may be in part because the declension narrative is relativized, as it is in
Ruether, but in Boff this serves to direct nearly all the attention toward the
“new paradigm” more than any diagnosis of the problem. We can likely
attribute this to the Marxist undercurrent in liberation theology, which
locates the solution to the present situation in neither some premodern
nor a preurban past, but rather through the construction of some radically
different future. The little attention given to such a task only serves to
implicate Christianity along with the other human elements responsible
for the ecological crisis.29 Yet, if we recall the quote from Boff earlier that
defines ecology as the science of relationality, we see that Boff too engages
rather shallowly with ecology. Though relationality is often seen as a main
tenant in ecology, and certainly the science is concerned with the relations
within a particular ecosystem, it is also concerned with demarcating these
relations in ecologically meaningful ways. Thus, ecologically, the slug on
the roadway, while being ecologically related to the particular ecosystem,
is not “related to everything else in all respects.” Or, to be more precise, it’s
relation to everything else differs importantly in intensity. A concept that
could prove fruitful in a theological context especially in terms of theoriz-
ing about theology’s discourse itself.
Conclusion: Ecological Thought

after the Perversity of Nature
Chapter 1 began with a discussion of the perversity of nature; how nature,
as a first name for the Real, is foreclosed to any singular thought. I have
attempted to demonstrate that by surveying the limit-relationship between
ecology and thought, philosophy and ecology, and theology and ecology.
In the first instance it was necessary to show that ecology thinks. Ecology,
as a science, has responded to various determinations of its practice by
philosophy and theology and this is most powerfully put forward in the
ecosystem concept. In the cases of philosophy and theology in relation to
ecology the aim was to locate certain tendencies common to these regional
knowledges that ultimately disclose the need for a deeper consideration of
ecology for philosophy and theology, or in the hybrid form of philosophi-
cal theology. For, the aim of this work is not so much to provide answers to
the ecological crisis, though if it were to aid in such a project that would be
welcome, but to test if thought itself can become intentionally ecological
in its construction of a theory of nature. It is clear that the main strands
of environmental philosophy, philosophy of nature, and ecotheology have
largely remained unchanged by their encounters with ecology. Be that for
reasons of a shallow engagement with the actual science of ecology or a dis-
trust of science in general that fact remains as an invariant. What is com-
mon in all these attempts to think ecologically, be it according to their own
terms as an ecological ethics or an ecotheology or according to our terms as
a philosophy or theology of subsumption or one of the other types, is the
remainder of a particular decision built upon faith in the self-sufficiency
of philosophy and/or theology. So, the question that arises after the chap-
ters in part I is: What if these environmental philosophies and theologies
are not thinking ecologically, that is, their thought is not ecological, not
merely because this is not their goal or is not a goal that would even occur
to them, but rather because the structure of their thought makes it such
that they are unable to think ecologically?
This is not to say that philosophical or theological problems are avoided
here. This is another reason for this long survey of our three regional
knowledges, for their traditional problems and the resources they use in
dealing with them will become our material for a unified theory of philo-
sophical theology and ecology. However, the philosophical and theological
materials will be treated under the sign of ecology. They will be treated as
particular ecosystems (of) thought that will be judged according to a cer-
tain ideational-diversity of their populations (of) thought as a sign of the
health of the ecosystem.
All of this will be treated in part III. This “immanental ecology” is nec-
essary because under the current regime of thought we can only enter into
an already declared and ongoing war between philosophy and theology
and the various internal wars raging between philosophers and theologians.
This war of opinion is endemic to philosophical and theological thought.
We aim not primarily for propositions that can be assented to or not, but a
more generic form of thought that can respond to ecological reality. Thus,
I will not enter into discussions about the destructive essence of modernity
or whether or not the new physics is actually scientifically tenable. I agree
with Boff (drawing on Koyré and Prigogine) that nonscientific forms of
thought need to be employed within a broad response to the environmen-
tal crisis.30 Indeed, the ideology of scientism, as captured within the wider
paradigm of the capitalist drive toward ecologically untenable growth, has
resulted in a certain mystification of reason. Yet, while I agree with Boff
and others about the need for a broad but unified response to the ecologi-
cal crisis, I don’t think philosophy and theology will themselves become
an ecological thought through the same withdrawal from ideologically
determined science, which is often in practice a withdrawal from science
altogether. Rather, we aim to radicalize certain elements of the preceding
forms of thought surveyed.
As I will argue in the proceeding chapter, we must see all thought as
equivalent before the Real, dare to go further into scientific thought along-
side philosophical theology in order to radicalize the subsumption model
by subsuming thought into a generic matrix. Not to subsume all thought to
a preconceived thought, but to conceive of a model, a kind of quasi meta-
physics that Laruelle calls philo-fiction (playing on science-fiction), from
which thought moves forward denuded of its presumption to divinity, or
its belief to be speaking for divinity. At the same time, this radicalizes
the bonded model, but instead of bonding philosophy to one science, we
understand that philosophy must always be bonded to non-philosophical
thoughts within the radicalized subsumption because of the perversity of
nature. From theology we see that metaphysics and ethics, dualisms in
general, may be unified when one begins to think from that which is fore-
closed to thought, which is the highest in thought, but this too is made
generic and denuded of its particular revelation within a generic framework
of revelation. From this unified perspective we may begin to respond to the
ecological crisis as a crisis in thought by way of an ecological thought.
Part II
The Non-Philosophical Matrix

Chapter 5
Theory of the Philosophical

Decision
Toward a Peaceable Democracy (of) Thought
At the end of the preceding chapter I ventured the thesis that the envi-
ronmental philosophies and theologies discussed do not think ecologi-
cally, that is, their thought is not ecological, because the structure of their
thought makes it such that they are unable to think ecologically. In this
chapter I will develop this idea by exploring the structural relationship that
philosophy and theology have with the sciences, which includes ecology of
course, and argue that it is the self-sufficient structure of philosophy and
theology that is responsible for this inability. Part II will focus on the work
of French thinker François Laruelle who has, for the last four decades,
developed a theory he calls non-philosophy or, more recently, non-standard
philosophy. In Laruelle’s view there is an intractable war between philoso-
phies and between philosophy and other regional knowledges, in particu-
lar science. The war is intractable because, by the criteria of intellectual
labor, each form of thought operates or works. John Mullarkey discusses
this in his own reading of Laruelle, showing how particular forms of
thought that claim to be at odds with one another nevertheless all still
have some level of success sufficient to allow them to believe these forms of
thoughts should persist, that they are right and helpful. Yet, the respective
metadiscourse, in our case the metaphilosophy or metatheology, “imply
that only one should work— their own. Their claims to truth are mutu-
ally exclusive. [ . . . ] And yet they still do both work.”1 The sense of “work”
Mullarkey deploys and the sense of ecological sense of work are essentially
of the same kind. This can be seen clearly in discussions on how differing
ecosystems can be said to “work,” that is, to “operate,” without their being
a single ecosystem that is the transcendent telos of the particular ecosys-
tems. Or, to put it in clearer, less theological language, the ecologist stud-
ies and describes the desert just as much as the rainforest, identifying its
ecological relations between the living, the dead, and the never-living, its
biodiversity, its resilience to disturbance, an evaluation of each ecosystem
according to certain generic criteria without passing judgment according
to a single transcendent ecosystem. Indeed, the ecologist tells us that the
desert is a viable ecosystem that works just as much as the rainforest does,
even if there are extreme differences between the two in terms of human
utility, which includes aesthetic appreciation, and even though there are
differences in less anthropocentric terms, as in the amount of biodiversity.
In fact, within the context of an ecosystem’s resilience, biodiversity is not
a good in and of itself. Rather, biodiversity operates within an ecosystem
as “a major source of future options and a system’s capacity to respond to
change and disturbance in different ways.”2 We are unable to pass judg-
ment based on the hard number or even the percentage of biodiversity
in one ecosystem over the other, but must evaluate the strength of that
biodiversity within the particular ecosystem it exists within. The same is
true of our ecosystems (of) thought; one cannot simply discard a particular
philosophy or theology on the basis of its low quotient of diversity of “spe-
cies (of) thought.” In this way, by evaluating and identifying the ecologi-
cal status of these various theologies and philosophies, what Laruelle calls
“making them equivalent,” we end the war by not participating in it within
this thought.3
Laruelle’s identification of a war within philosophy may be a stumbling
block for those who want to engage with his work. However, even if we
bar this word “war” from our description of philosophy (and theology and
ecology) there is undoubtedly still an antagonism between philosophers,
theologians, and science. This is clear in each of the ecologies, philoso-
phies, and theologies reviewed in the preceding chapter and it would seem
that, aside from a few fits and starts here and there, neither side is seri-
ous about fostering peace, what Laruelle calls a democracy (of) thought
and even a communism (of) thought, between their disciplines.4 A remark
from Husserl on science serves to illustrate both the general philosophical
attitude toward science as well as the theological method:
One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how
exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense. To deduce
is not to explain. To predict, or to recognize the objective forms of the
composition of physical or chemical bodies and to predict accordingly—all
Theory of the Philosophical Decision 61
this explains nothing but is in need of explanation. The only true way to
explain is to make transcendentally understandable. Everything objective
demands to be understood. Natural-scientific knowing about nature thus
gives us no truly explanatory, no ultimate knowledge of nature because it
does not investigate nature at all in the absolute framework through which
its actual and genuine being reveals its ontic meaning; thus natural science
never reaches this being thematically.5
What is the cause of such aggression? Non-Philosophy does not aim, in

its mature formulation, at a simple overturning of the usual philosophi-
cal hierarchy that places science below fundamental inquiry. So, from the
perspective of non-philosophy, we can recognize that when the sciences,
ecology included, attempted to free themselves from philosophical over-
determination they did so through their own antagonistic means. They
made their own philosophical claims and often, despite the structures of
scientific practice, set up their own sense of self-sufficiency. Yet, this vio-
lence on the part of the scientist does not excuse the aggression of the
philosopher, who polemically claims that science does not think. For the
philosopher science needs to be transcendentally grounded, which phi-
losophy does through a fundamental inquiry into the very conditions for
thinking. Without this fundamental inquiry science “explains nothing.”
A similar stance is found in theology where theologians argue that the
sciences can only make sense, can only have meaning, if they relate their
discussion about beings to the ultimate Being who is God. Without God,
some brash theologians may claim, the ecologist cannot even recognize a
tree but only see brute, dead matter.
Is there any truth to these claims? The axiom that nature is not hid-
den but perverse suggests that, as Husserl claims, science cannot explain
nature, though that does not have to do with science’s structural inabil-
ity to think but with the real character of nature as disclosed by science.
In other words, it is science, specifically ecology in this instance, that
shows the perversity of nature and that shows that nature may be thought
from, but never captured by thought. Can we not say, against Husserl,
that everything subjective demands to be understood? After all, Husserl’s
escape from the natural attitude by way of the transcendental subjectivity
is itself dependent on natural processes, on nature as such. Furthermore,
it isn’t at all clear that any mutation of philosophy by science destroys
its ability to make things transcendentally understandable. In part IV, I
will argue, against this very idea and building off the non-philosophy of
Laruelle, that a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology is
just such a transcendental (or more accurately “immanental”) approach to
both philosophy, theology, and nature as an immanental ecology.
In chapters 5 and 6, I will provide a more straightforward explica-

tion of Laruelle’s theory. Laruelle’s non-philosophy attempts to provide
a theory of philosophy, not a metaphilosophy as such, but a “science of
philosophy” that locates its identity or invariant structure that allows the
non-philosopher to use philosophy as material within a wider theoretical
framework that aims to overcome problems in philosophy through uni-
fied theories of philosophy and some other material of thought. In this
chapter I explain his theory of the philosophical decision, which he argues
is the invariant structure or identity of philosophy as such. His theory of
the philosophical decision is important as it explains how standard phi-
losophy is predicated on a practice of self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency
explains how standard environmental philosophies and philosophies of
nature operate without any strong engagement with ecological material.
This opens up to the next chapter, which is centered on Laruelle’s under-
standing of science. This understanding is very different from the standard
approach to science in both Continental philosophy (both its rejection of
science and more positive projects such as that of Badiou or Deleuze and
Guattari) and analytic philosophy, which tends toward various forms of
positivism. This discussion of the non-philosophical approach to science
opens up to a more general discussion of the practice of non-philosophy
and its current “matrix.” This necessarily follows because the understand-
ing of science and the practice of non-philosophy are immanent to one
another.
In the last chapter of part II, I turn to a discussion of what I term
“non-theology.” This is my own contribution to the practice of
non-philosophy and aims to explain and develop Laruelle’s engagement
with theological and religious material in the light of his understanding
of science. The response to the theologian will have to be more axiomatic
and less communicative. For what else is the theologian attempting to
argue except that science must submit itself to theology; often the claim is
that it must submit itself to a particular strand of theology that proclaims
itself as “orthodox.” Simply put, theology must be denuded of its pretense
to orthodoxy and theological material must be thought from the perspec-
tive of the “generic secular,” a concept I will explain at greater length in
chapter 7. This mutation of theology into simple material will allow us to
see how non-philosophy repeats the general structure of theological think-
ing and how non-philosophy may engage with theological material. Of
course many theologians are open to a peaceableness between disciplines
(as many of the ecotheologians discussed in the previous chapter are) and
refuse to enter into the war that some theologians have declared on all
forms of thinking that do not submit themselves to their orthodoxy. The
argument here is simply to provide a theory of how that peaceableness
is possible. Thus this refusal of the grand theological pronouncement

that “only theology saves X” calls for a non-theological supplement to
non-philosophy, lest it too fall into such a temptation, a temptation that
exists because of its shared general thought structure. This non-theological
supplement to non-philosophy, which is found in the last chapter of
part II, marks a real development of non-philosophy with regard to
theology in a way that Laruelle has himself not explicitly made. Ultimately
this non-philosophical and non-theological practice, with all its constitu-
tive parts, declares peace to all—the philosophers, the theologians, and
the ecologists.
Theory of the Philosophical Decision
The starting questions for a reader may simply be, why Laruelle? Why
non-philosophy? In other words, what is different about non-philosophy as
a practice of thinking and an organization of that thinking in comparison
to the general structure of philosophy and theology present in the environ-
mental theologies and philosophies reviewed in the previous chapter? Or,
at a more abstract level, what is the relationship between non-philosophy
and standard philosophical practice? The answer is that Laruelle provides a
more rigorous criticism of philosophy’s relationship to science than is pres-
ent in other philosophers I have come across. This criticism avoids being a
negation of philosophy by understanding that criticism is a way to free phi-
losophy at its most radical, which is to say at its most immanent. By free-
ing philosophy in this way it helps projects that use the non-philosophical
model to avoid the pitfalls of standard philosophical practice and in this
way allows one to step outside the arbitrary choices given in choosing
between Heidegger or Russell, Deleuze or Quine, Bergson or Badiou,
Levinas or Singer (using the names of these philosophers as an index of
their thought). Each is relative and one is freed from the necessity of judg-
ment and war and thus able to select and construct alongside of material
that lies outside of philosophy as such.
To fully answer these questions and bear out the claims I make about
the liberty given by non-philosophy we need to give some attention to
Laruelle’s theory and analysis of the philosophical decision. This aspect of
non-philosophy has largely been the focus of his reception in Anglophone
philosophy, as in the speculative nihilism of Ray Brassier. The project
developed here recognizes the importance of the theory of philosophical
decision, but it will not be the main focus of the project and I will not go
into great detail about it, in part because the theory is well explained in
both Brassier and Mullarkey.6 Instead, I understand the theory from the
perspective of the matrix given in the current phase of non-philosophy
(Laruelle calls this Philosophy V and I explain this periodization in more
depth in the next chapter). In this current phase Laruelle understands the
identification of the philosophical decision as what allows non-philosophy
to free thought, specifically in its philosophical forms and forms over-
determined by philosophy, from the illusions perpetuated by standard
philosophy, by locating its relative autonomy in the face of the absolute
autonomy of the Real. This allows for the production of new constructive
and speculative solutions to old philosophical problems. By locating this
structure of philosophy it locates philosophy as material and thus it frees
philosophy to enter into more fruitful relationships with other discursive
fields.
Laruelle claims that the philosophical decision forms the invariant
structure of standard philosophical thinking and always introduces a new
transcendence, and thus new hallucinations, even in those philosophies
that claim to be of immanence. Ultimately the theory of the Philosophical
Decision claims that
[p]hilosophy is not only a set of categories and objects, syntax and experi-
ences, operations of decision and position: it is animated and traversed by
a faith or belief in itself as if in an absolute reality, by an intentionality or
reference to the real that it claims to describe and even constitute, or to
itself as if the real.7
This philosophical faith in philosophy fosters a sense of philosophical

self-sufficiency, named the “principle of sufficient philosophy” by Laruelle
and meaning that “everything is philosophizable.” The philosophers
believe that they can provide a unitary thought that brings together the
constituted and the unconstituted, that it can disclose the ultimate reality
of everything, and that it does so through its own categories and objects,
syntax and experiences, operations of decision and position. At issue here,
then, is the relationship of philosophical thought toward the Real and so,
to understand Laruelle’s theory of the philosophical decision, I will give
some attention to these two terms and explain their function. In order
to make the function of these terms clearer I will engage with criticisms
made by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux of non-philosophy,
as it captures succinctly common misunderstandings of Laruelle’s project,
and explain these terms by way of comparison with Meillassoux’s standard
philosophical understanding of the Real and his own critique of the overall
movement of post-Kantian metaphysics.
Structure of the Philosophical Decision and the

Practice of Non-Philosophy
Non-Philosophy is the practice of philosophy mutated to act within the
posture of science. Posture in this sense relates to the fact that science, in its
lived practices as opposed to its philosophical form, does not take a position
on an object, but has a certain practical posture or stance toward it. From
this posture Laruelle created early in his career (Philosophy II) a science of
philosophy, treating philosophy as the object of scientific inquiry. From the
practice of this science Laruelle claims to have located the essence of phi-
losophy in what he calls the “Philosophical Decision.” In his Philosophies
of Difference, one of the main texts of Philosophy II, Laruelle develops
his first theory of the philosophical decision that is then developed more
rigorously in Principles of Non-Philosophy.8 In sum, the philosophical deci-
sion is located, according to Laruelle, as an invariant structure organizing
all philosophical endeavors. Whereas his own non-philosophy attempts to
think from the vision-in-One or what he also calls “radical immanence”
that conjoins what other philosophies call immanence, transcendence, and
the transcendental, the philosophical decision is simply a dyad between
immanence and transcendence where, as Ray Brassier explains it, “imma-
nence features twice, its internal structure subdivided between an empiri-
cal and a transcendental function.”9 In condensed terms, philosophy
breaks up immanence through positing some empirical datum separate
from the transcendence of its a priori factum (otherwise understood as the
fact of givenness of something apart from its empirical appearing) that
must then be brought back together through some third transcendental
thing (the ego, certain conceptions of immanence, experience, etc.).10 In
slightly more accessible terms Laruelle tells us in his Dictionnaire de la
non-philosophie that “[t]he philosophical decision is an operation of tran-
scendence that believes (in a naïve and hallucinatory way) in the possibil-
ity of a unitary discourse of the Real.”11 This philosophical decision, like
many of the main concepts in non-philosophy, has an analogue in stan-
dard philosophy. For instance, Brassier traces the structure of this decision
(which we will see is repeated by Meillassoux in his critique) by focusing
on its analogue with the Kantian transcendental deduction. In Brassier’s
helpful synthetic reconstruction of the formal structure of the Decision,
dependent largely on Laruelle’s essay “The Transcendental Method,” he
focuses on the mixture of transcendence and immanence in philosophy,
where there is an initial separation of the empirical/immanent and a priori/
transcendent, of datum and faktum, that is then “gathered together” and
united again under some absolute transcendental authority (Descartes’ “I

think,” Kant’s faculties, Husserl’s ego), which, Laruelle notes, is ultimately
also some reified empirical thing and the final moment of unification where
the conditioned and the unconditioned are “mixed” and shown to cocon-
stitute one another. This final moment is a second form of immanence,
but one that is transcendentally represented. It is this whole process, taken
to expose the transcendental conditions for being, that is coextensive with
philosophy and leads to the confusion that it is thereby co-constituting of
the Real.12 It is important to note that what Brassier traces is the structure
of the philosophical decision present in post-Kantian philosophy, but the
philosophical decision may take on different forms from the Kantian ones
discussed in his reconstruction. Thus Laruelle says of the datum and the
faktum that they are “invariants and not [ . . . ] entities or essences.”13 The
point being that the structure may take a different form, that the same
Kantian aspects may not be found in every philosophy, but that this invari-
ant structure, which is triadic since it is formed of a dyad that is united (not
unified) and thus identified together as a third, will be that which defines
philosophical practice and leads it to confuse itself for or as circumscribing
any X it claims to be Real.14
It seems a sweeping statement, and there is little doubt that this tran-
scendental description of philosophy has led many to frustrated rejection of
Laruelle’s work, but is it true? Is standard philosophy structurally incapable
of stepping outside of this triadic image of thought, which always posits
a transcendence disguised as immanence? The answer to that question
may be impossible to give definitively within the scope of this book, but it
seems plausible since Laruelle has traced it within European philosophy’s
most radical philosophers (Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Derrida, Deleuze, Michel Henry, and Badiou, among others). Others who
have taken up the task of non-philosophy have also located this structure
in the thought of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Levinas, and Marion;
in the philosophically influenced sociology of Pierre Bourdieu; in the
antiphilosophies of Blanchot and Lacan; and stretching from the ancient
philosophy of Plato to contemporary standard approaches to epistemology
and aesthetics.15 It is certainly true of the general structure of environmen-
tal philosophy (though a theory of the principle of sufficient theology will
be required to explain the structural inability of environmental theology,
which will be undertaken later). Such a structure will take on particulari-
ties inherent to each expression of environmental philosophy, but we can
trace a general structure that unites all the philosophies reviewed in the
previous chapter. We hinted at it there already when we located a split
between the ethical and the metaphysical. Which aspect takes the place of
the immanent and which the transcendent will vary, but for the majority
of philosophies it will be the stuff of the metaphysical or “natural” that is

taken to be the immanent object and the ethical will be the transcendent
condition for thinking this stuff within a properly environmentalist prac-
tice. The decision that separates the ethical and the metaphysical is a pure
amphibology, however, since what is and what should be are confused,
they shift from one to the other, insofar as both are dependent on a con-
ception of nature that unites them. Nature in this instance is both some
reified thing, nature as object to be studied, and the transcendental condi-
tion for thinking it; one must first be natural in order to naturally think.
In this way philosophy bars itself from engaging with science as an equal,
since science has merely provided the brute data regarding nature that can
only be thought under the condition of the ethical and represented as a
whole philosophically. In the instance of philosophy of nature the aim is
to think nature completely as the grounds of thought, to move from the
object = X to the absolute itself. In both cases this structure ultimately
reflects the philosophical decision itself, for the thing-in-itself is now taken
to be the split object united under transcendental philosophical representa-
tion. The object is turned into a mirror that reflects back philosophy. That
philosophy then takes to mean that philosophy is able to adequately reflect
back the Real itself, to circumscribe it.
Because of his focus on the Real and positive engagement with sci-
ence Laruelle’s project has been confused in the Anglophone reception of
his work with that of Quentin Meillassoux’s “speculative materialism,”
which also aims to think a “non-correlative” form of philosophy that
has access to the thing-in-itself or the Real. It is interesting then to note
that Meillassoux himself proffered a critique of non-philosophy, which
contains within it all the standard philosophical misunderstandings of
Laruelle’s non-philosophy, at an event called “Speculative Realism” held
at Goldsmiths, University of London, on April 27, 2007, the transcript
of which was published by the independent journal Collapse.16 In the cri-
tique put forth at this event Meillassoux even comes to confuse Laruelle’s
project with his own, in part because he is following and responding to
Ray Brassier’s work Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007),
which uses both Laruelle and Meillassoux to advance a particular nihilistic
and scientistic philosophical project. In that book Brassier claims that while
Meillassoux identifies more clearly and rigorously the inherent antirealism
of continental post-Kantian philosophy (which he calls “correlationism”), it
is Laruelle’s axiomatic stance regarding the Real that grounds any noncor-
relationist realist philosophy. Brassier holds this thesis because, in his view
at the time of that book, Laruelle’s axiomatic method of non-philosophy
avoids any recourse to “intellectual intuition” while Meillassoux has to
posit it in his own philosophy.17 Meillassoux says that his project consists
“in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated,

which is to say a world capable of subsisting without being given. But to
say this is just to say that we must grasp how thought is able to access an
absolute.”18 In this discussion of the theory of philosophical decision I am
unconcerned with setting in conflict Meillassoux’s speculative materialism
or Brassier’s transcendental nihilism against Laruelle’s non-philosophy. I
focus only on Meillassoux’s critique and contextualize Brassier’s reading
with the ultimate aim of illuminating non-philosophy’s identification of
the Philosophical Decision as well as the method and content developed in
response to that structure or the method that Laruelle uses upon the mate-
rial found in the various standard philosophies.19
Meillassoux’s own critique of post-Kantian philosophy locates a cor-
relation between thought and Being that is unable to account for a time
anterior to the conditions for thought, that is to say it is unable to think
Being separate from thought. Further to this, the correlationist thus
must either explicitly or implicitly, in a weak or strong form, claim that
thought determines Being (not, as Laruelle claims philosophy thinks, the
Real). This leads, in part, to antirealism, but not primarily. Meillassoux
says, “Correlationism is not, in my definition, an anti-realism but an
anti-absolutism.”20 Correlationism is challenged by Meillassoux’s own
speculative materialism, which confronts correlationism with an aporia
in its inability to think a real ancestral event outside any possibility of
thought and builds a metaphysics of the absolute that focuses on primary
qualities as the object in itself.21 Correlationism is also challenged by spec-
ulative idealism, which includes for him panpsychism and vitalism, which
claims that the absolute is the correlation itself and is thus dependent on
the structure of correlationism. Thus, Meillassoux’s goal is to champion
one philosophy, an anticorrelationist speculative materialism that develops
a metaphysics of Being from primary qualities, over against other philoso-
phies. His problem is then a philosophical one and completely oriented
toward questions about the Being of things. This should not be confused
with Laruelle’s project as seen in his development of a theory of philosophi-
cal decision.
It is at this point in Meillassoux’s critique that he confuses Laruelle’s
conception of the Real with his own conception of a thing-in-itself as
primary qualities. This is a perfect example of the philosophical decision
at work—the thing-in-itself is taken to be the Real and philosophy encom-
passes the Real, understands it and circumscribes it, by splitting it into pri-
mary qualities and secondary qualities that are united through appearance.
Whereas the Real in non-philosophy is not circumscribed, non-philosophy
does not limit it to primary qualities, does not exclude anything from the
Real; in fact, it refuses to think the Real, instead it aims to think from
the Real as foreclosed to thought. Meillassoux confuses this practice of

non-philosophy when he claims that Laruelle’s “non-philosophy is sup-
posed to think the relation of thinking with a Real which precedes philos-
ophy,” but this, Meillassoux says, exposes a contradiction in Laruelle, for
“the name ‘non-philosophy’ can only be constructed from the name ‘phi-
losophy’ together with a negation. Philosophy precedes non-philosophy in
nomination, as in the acts of thinking.”22 In other words, Meillassoux is
claiming that the Real, which is supposed to be autonomous and prior to
philosophy in his reading of Laruelle, is only thought in non-philosophy
after the negation of philosophy. This is a misunderstanding of Laruelle’s
project and brings to the fore the major differences between the stan-
dard philosophical project and the non-philosophical one. First, as has
already been mentioned but which must be repeated to detractors of
non-philosophy again and again, the “non” in non-philosophy is not a
negation of philosophy, it is a mutation of philosophical practice, which
takes its posture from non-Euclidean geometry (which, of course, is not
a negation of geometry!).23 Laruelle has been clear about this throughout
the development of non-philosophy. Even at his most polemical he has held
that non-philosophy is not a new philosophy but a new practice that uses
philosophy. In Philosophie et non-philosophie he writes:
Non-philosophy is not the mass negation of philosophy, its (impossible)

destruction, but another use of it, the only one which is able to be defined
outside of its spontaneous belief in itself; a practice of philosophy which is no
longer founded and enclosed within philosophical faith, but that establishes
itself in a positive way within the limits given by placing that faith between
parentheses.24
The point of non-philosophy is simply not to think the Real. The first
axiom of non-philosophy is that the Real is foreclosed to thought and so
it cannot think the Real in any meaningful sense, in any sense that would
change the Real, but it may only think from it. It does not aim at reviving a
prior philosophy or constructing a realist philosophy that grounds science
or that protects philosophy from embarrassment before science. Laruelle
aims to make all philosophies equivalent, to take up a scientific posture
toward philosophy, in order to leave the war between philosophers, using
them as simple material in an autonomous exercise that is thought from
the Real.
This aspect of Meillassoux’s critique, in its confusion with itself, does
not really touch on non-philosophy. Its weakness arises partly as confusion
of the order of Laruelle’s thought. The first task is to posit an axiom that
states that the Real is radically autonomous to philosophy. This axiom is
arrived at by copying the posture of scientific thought. Being analogous to

the phenomenological suspension of the natural attitude, it can be called
a suspension of the philosophical attitude that suspends the principle of
sufficient philosophy. From this axiom non-philosophy aims to think from
the Real, giving this act the name of “vision-in-One.” All philosophers ask
what the philosophical act consists in, but this change of posture aims at
a more radical answer to the question, for when philosophers pose this
meta-philosophical question they can only pose it within philosophy itself,
they are unable to ask the question from outside of the very essence of phi-
losophy.25 By taking the scientific posture or stance, the stance from the
One (as a first name of the Real), one can render all philosophies equiva-
lent in their posture toward the Real and accountable to the Real as depen-
dent upon it.
By taking the scientific posture against the pretensions engendered by
the Philosophical Decision, Laruelle humbles philosophy. This stance pos-
its the radical autonomy of the Real, which is to be differentiated from
something like an “absolute” autonomy. What the radical autonomy of
the Real means is that the Real is unobjectionable, it always outruns the
structures of the Philosophical Decision, it is unrepresentable actuality:
“[T]he real is given before all givenness [donation].”26 This fundamental
axiom, one of the most primary of non-philosophical principles, is the
site of Meillassoux’s stronger criticism. While I located a weak criticism
in Meillassoux’s confusion of the name “non-philosophy” and the order
of operations in non-philosophy’s methodology, there is this other aspect
of Meillassoux’s criticism that seems to be more damning. The criticism is
directed at the axiomatic nature of non-philosophy, which is its positing
of the Real “prior to philosophy” (this is Meillassoux’s language, while it
is more non-philosophical to say “radically autonomous to thought” or
“foreclosed to thought”). Meillassoux’s criticism is direct and claims that
Laruelle does not prove the existence of this Real, but merely posits it—
meaning that the Real is a posited Real and thus correlational.27
It is true that there is no hiding this axiomatic character in
non-philosophy. Throughout Laruelle’s corpus there are axiomatic descrip-
tions of the Real, taken to be nonabsolute, but rather a witness to the
radical autonomy of the Real. So, when Meillassoux accuses Laruelle of
“merely positing” the Real he is calling on the non-philosopher to account
for the very practice that non-philosophy prizes, which is precisely not
to think philosophically about the Real and instead to think from a real-
ist suspension that develops the consequences for thought (what is called
“philo-fiction” as a mutation of metaphysics) of the primary axiom, the
Real is foreclosed to thought. This non-philosophical response can only be
frustrating to the philosopher of the absolute whose aim is get to the Real
= X beyond the X that is thought. While Meillassoux attempts to argue

with the correlationist on philosophical grounds, the scientific posture of
non-philosophy completely ignores the arguments of philosophy on the
basis of a realist suspension. The question then isn’t about “argument,”
the rules of which appear to be known only to the particular philosopher
or school of philosophers, it becomes one of practice as organized by the
principles of non-philosophy.
What I am terming here the “realist suspension” is, then, the response to
the Meillassoux’s challenge to the axiomatic character of non-philosophy.
That is, the Real is pragmatically asserted through a variety of axioms,
rather than circumscribed and represented as in Meillassoux’s philosophy
that claims all primary qualities, qualities of the absolute thing-in-itself,
can be known sufficiently though mathematics. For, while Meillassoux
runs aground in his terms on the necessary correlation of mathematics and
human thought the realist suspension is a pragmatic style of thought that
asserts the ultimately Real identity of all things. There are two aspects of
the realist suspension: that all things are in-the-last-instance Real, meaning
that they remain what they are, and at the same time as the Real is itself
foreclosed to the thought. So, real objects may be described and known
while the Real is always the deductively known cause of these real objects,
not ontologically, but as One. Brassier helpfully summarizes the six corol-
lary axiomatic descriptions of the Real as found in Laruelle’s Philosophie et
non-philosophie, which further describe the basis of the realist suspension:
1. The [R]eal is phenomenon-in-itself, the phenomenon as already -

given or given-without-givenness, rather than constituted as given
via the transcendental synthesis of empirical and a priori, given and
givenness.
2. The [R]eal is the phenomenon as already-manifest or manifest-
without-manifestation, the phenomenon-without-phenomenality,
rather than the phenomenon which is posited and presupposed as
manifest in accordance with the transcendental synthesis of mani-
fest and manifestation.
3. The [R]eal is that in and through which we have been already -gripped
rather than any originary factum or datum by which we suppose
ourselves to be gripped.
4. The [R]eal is already- acquired prior to all cognitive or intuitive acqui-
sition, rather than that which is merely posited and presupposed as
acquired through the a priori forms of cognition and intuition.
5. The [R]eal is already-inherent prior to all the substantialist forcings
of inherence, conditioning all those supposedly inherent models of
identity, be they analytic, synthetic, or differential.
6. The [R]eal is already-undivided rather than the transcendent unity

which is posited and presupposed as undivided and deployed in
order to effect the transcendental synthesis of the empirical and the
metaphysical.28
Some have suggested that using the One to discuss the Real as prior to
Being and Alterity and foreclosed to both suggests that non-philosophy
is a “negative theology” of the Real. In reality non-philosophy isn’t a
negation at all, but rather takes the same pragmatic posture that science
does with regard to its own practices. It would be a mistake to call this a
naivety, as Husserl does, for rather than a negation it is actually a more
lived form of thinking. More adequate to the ways in which one actually
practices thinking in the flow of ordinary time. That is, it takes the Real
as the necessary “superstructure” for thought, rather than as that whose
being or nonbeing negates the possibility of thinking in general.29 In other
words, the realist suspension, which can be found in science, is a rela-
tionship with the Real that thinks without any recourse to a transcendent
self-founding.30 Non-Philosophy is a practice, not an account of foun-
dation, and in that way it does mirror theology and, while escaping the
critiques of Meillassoux, still requires a non-theology to supplement and
complete its practice by explaining the immanent practices and resistance
to illusion at work in the realist suspension of non-philosophy. But before
turning to that non-theology we must first explain the practice and prin-
ciples of non-philosophy that non-theology necessarily builds from.
Chapter 6
The Practice and Principles of

Non-Philosophy
In order to fully understand the practice of non-philosophy we need to

examine the different forms it has taken through its development. These
are called waves by Laruelle and by looking at the form each has taken
with regard to the status of the fundamental axioms of non-philosophy
we will begin to understand how non-philosophy is practiced alongside of
principles rather than a law-bound method. I will then turn to a discussion
of how Laruelle provides a model or philo-fiction, what standard philoso-
phy may call both a metaphysics and a metaphilosophy, for understand-
ing how philosophy and science may come together in a unified theory.
While this may seem at first glance unrelated to the project undertaken
in this work, a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology, it is
actually important as the work undertaken here benefits from the experi-
ence and mature formulation of the relationship between philosophy and
science. Non-Philosophy provides the philo-fiction that allows us to treat
these discursive fields as simple material, as an occasion for thought that
is autonomous but foreclosed from the Real and this realization is liberat-
ing for thought as it breaks the transcendental hallucinations of standard
philosophical practice, whether that practice goes under the name of sci-
entism or vitalism.
The Axiomatic Practice of Non-Philosophy
The question of the relationship between science and philosophy was cen-
tral in Laruelle’s shifting from a typical philosophical practice (what he
calls placing one’s thought under the “principle of sufficient philosophy”)

to the founding of the non-philosophical project. This attempt to think
science and philosophy together is not hidden in his work and is given a
central place in his own history of non-philosophy outlined in his impor-
tant Principles of Non-Philosophy. Here he explains the periodization he has
given his own work and that is to be found in nearly every book of his; on
the page typically reserved for “Books by the Same Author” you will find a
division of his twenty-one books into a categories labeled “Philosophy I” to
“Philosophy V.” Recently he claimed that he had “finally understood the
principle of this endless classification, they are not movements or stages,
perhaps they are phases, but most certainly they are waves, nothing other
than waves, it is always the same form with slightly different water each
time.”1 Laruelle’s self-assessment of his work refers to how the general struc-
ture of non-philosophy has remained more or less constant throughout the
25 years since the practice of non-philosophy proper began. Laruelle calls
this structure philo-fiction in order to differentiate this theory from the
standard philosophical name of metaphysics, which is its closest equivalent
in philosophical practice since both discuss, in very different ways, the
structure or relationship of thought and being.
The general shape of these different waves, which will be discussed in
more detail here, can be succinctly summed up in a paragraph. The general
aim of non-philosophy is to think a transcendental realism that fosters a
certain equality among objects and discursive materials. Non-Philosophy
posits a Real that is foreclosed to philosophical thought, meaning that phi-
losophy does not have any effect on the Real, the Real is radically autono-
mous from thought, but thought, as ultimately Real in-the-last-instance,
also contains a certain relative autonomy and so any particular expression
of thought can be taken as a simple material for an occasional theory.
Occasional in this sense refers to the lack of self-sufficiency in those
theories, a positive lack that protects against philosophical illusions of
co-relation with the Real. Laruelle’s early work, which includes the books
listed under the heading of Philosophy I, was undertaken in large part
as a standard philosopher writing works on the history of philosophy,
political philosophy, and deconstruction. Philosophy II marks his break
with what he calls the “principle of sufficient philosophy” after he comes
to recognize an invariant structure to philosophy that limits thought by
taking philosophy as, in some sense, unlimited. In this period Laruelle
aims to break this sufficiency by way of a confrontation between phi-
losophy and science, and during this period there is a simple reversal and
overturning of the dominant hierarchy between philosophy and science
as identified by Laruelle. In the period under the heading of Philosophy
III Laruelle moves beyond just a mere reversal of this hierarchy, making
Non-Philosophy—Practice and Principles 75
actual the declaration of peace to the philosopher that had been hinted
at in the previous period by way of his conception of a unified theory of
philosophy and science. This theory was unified, rather than a unity,
because of the general philo-fiction structure that theorized both dis-
cursive practices as relative before the Real. In Philosophy IV Laruelle
deploys this unified theory in a number of investigations of other non
philosophical material (in the sense that they lie outside of “philosophy
proper,” hence why I have left out the hyphen), returning to questions
about politics and turning for the first time to a serious investigation
of religion, thereby deepening his concepts and elements of style, like
heresy, that he had lifted from various religious traditions and that were
already operative in his earlier works.
In his Principles of Non-Philosophy he provides a short history of the
development of non-philosophy in relation to the way that the axioms
of non-philosophy were modified in accordance with new materials. He
claims that what changes within the structure of non-philosophy, what he
now describes as “the water of the wave,” is the axioms at play within it. Here
Laruelle locates three distinct periods of non-philosophy, Philosophy I–III,
that he thinks responds to the triadic structure of philosophy itself (under-
stood by Laruelle to find its essence in the philosophical decision).2 In his
own estimation the work of non-philosophy, where philosophy is finally
taken as a simple material that one can work with, does not truly begin
until Philosophy III and is not truly completed until his latest major work,
Philosophie non-standard. Philosophy I is characterized by what may be
described in a Deleuzian way, as Laruelle’s apprenticeship in philosophy.
In his own words this period should be understood to have “placed itself
under the authority of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy.”3 He contin-
ues on to say, that at this stage he
already sought to put certain themes to work; themes that would only find
their definitive form, a transformed form, in Philosophy III: the individual,
its identity and its multiplicity, a transcendental and productive experience
of thought, the theoretical domination of philosophy, the attempt to con-
struct a problematic rivaling that of Marx, though mainly on Nietzschean
terrain and with Nietzschean means.4
While the work here prefigured in an indefinite form the problems that
Laruelle continued to consider well into Philosophy III, its true addition
to the project of non-philosophy was the discovery of the principle of
sufficient philosophy or the philosophical faith that everything is philoso-
phizable. In the end this faith in the sufficiency of philosophy masks a cor-
relation between philosophy and the appearance of the Real found in the
various regional knowledges philosophy is dependent upon (science, art,

politics, psychoanalysis, etc.) and allows the philosopher to confuse the
philosophy-of-X with X itself, through the operation of the philosophical
decision described in the previous chapter. Philosophy comes to be con-
fused with the Real itself, rather than seeing that the X of philosophy-of-X
is actually a reflection of itself.
Philosophy II marks Laruelle’s break with thinking under the conditions
of this philosophical (self-)sufficiency, but that break is, he tells us, “more
than a break or more than a new primary decision, it is the subordination
of the non-philosophical decision to its immanent cause, the vision-in-
One.”5 While we are already familiar with one of these two terms, the
philosophical decision, the vision-in-One needs explication here. In order
to overcome the narcissism that arises out of the hallucinatory splitting of
immanence Laruelle situates the philosophical decision in its immanent
cause—the vision-in-One. The vision-in-One is equivalent to the Real,
meaning that when one thinks from (rather than about) the Real then one
is thinking from the vision-in-One as radical immanence. Laruelle appears
to be intentionally obscure about what the One is, describing it through
axioms alone, because non-philosophy aims to renounce the philosophi-
cal desire-for-the-One or the thought-of-the-One that always subordinates
the One to Being or sometimes to Alterity. This renunciation allows the
One to become a first name for the Real that does not circumscribe the
Real, but actually is the Real as name; thus Laruelle uses the two terms
interchangeably depending on the operative occasion.6 One can, however,
come to know from-the-One when one begins to realize that all discourses
persist through the vision-in-One, but do not in themselves constitute the
discourse on the One. The One is radical immanence itself and thus the
vision-in-One is immanent to the One itself:
The vision-in-One properly speaking is neither a philosophy “of,” neither

is it a vision-of-the-World, which is only a philosophical intuition of the
World: it is, very precisely, the vision of the One in the One and from there
the vision of the World and of the Philosophy in the One. It is the experi-
ence which is absolutely sufficient for thought and for which it is not neces-
sary to look for “Being” or “ontology,” nor even the “forgetting of Being,” in
order to think in a way that is positive, radical and coherent; which has no
need construct it with Being, in its aporias and infinite topologies, in order
to give it a reality that it holds other than itself; of which it is not enough to
think “in” it, nor even in using it if that use is not going to really manifest
and describe its essence, to give justice [rendre justice] to its specificity, and
not confuse it with those figures of Being and the World that are still well
exterior. [ . . . ] The vision-in-One is the experience of thought that remains
once and for all in the One without feeling the need or the pretension of
leaving it or even of having to reach it, even when it undertakes to look at

the World, Being, Philosophy, and History “for themselves.”7
Thus Philosophy II was founded on two complementary axioms: “1) The

One is vision immanent in-One. 2) There is a special affinity between the
vision-in-One and the phenomenal experience of ‘scientific thought.’”8
To fully understand the vision-in-One one must also understand the
function of the name One, as a name for the nonconceptual Real fore-
closed to thought. The One and the Real are equivalent. The six axiomatic
descriptions of the One that Brassier summarized in the previous chapter
quoted earlier (though he did not follow Laruelle in capitalizing the word
perhaps owing to a personal distaste for the way it looks in English) are
actually referred, in the original text Philosophie et non-philosophie from
which they are derived, as an axiomatic matrix concerning the One. The
two words are sometimes written together as the “Real-One” and clearly,
within non-philosophy, there is a central connection between the Real
and the One. To put it simply, the Real is nonconceptual; it is always
already foreclosed to thought, to any absolute circumscription, to any
philosophical determination, to any ontological or ethical determination.
The One, a name taken from philosophy but ultimately forgotten by it
in favor of Being and Alterity, becomes a privileged name for the Real in
non-philosophy because it is beyond Being and Alterity. It refuses to split
and is at the root of other words that name radical immanence. Keep in
mind that in French the One is l’Un and that this Un is found within other
words that bear witness to the radical immanence of the lived, meaning
here the “lived-without-life” or the actuality of the lived without the tran-
scendental guarantee of life. There is something important to the syntax of
non-philosophy operative within the French language here and this opera-
tion is difficult to translate into English. Life is determined by the lived,
and it is only from the perspective of a transcendental understanding of
life that the lived is another thing. Thus, within non-philosophy it is the
indeterminate that is primary. Not the indeterminate as what is sometimes
referred to pejoratively as “postmodern flux,” but the indeterminate as
that which escapes any determination, that remains relatively autonomous
and equal before the Real. It is the indeterminate of the “un/e ” carried in
French as the indefinite article. Thus, there is a certain similarity between
Deleuze’s focus on a life [une vie] as the name for immanence in his last
essay and Laruelle’s obsession with the philo-fiction of the One. That is,
Laruelle’s particular conception of immanence is as radical immanence.
I will explain this in more detail later, but for now it suffices to say that
radical immanence refers to the practical actuality of immanence, rather
than its metaphysical character as a plane, an objective, a proclamation,
immanence in a “manner of thinking.”9 Immanence is thus always sin-

gular; it is always prior to any determination by transcendence; tran-
scendence is never transcendent to immanence, but always determined
in-the-last-instance by immanence.
The One then comes to be the site where non-philosophy develops its
principles of style. Where it experiments with thinking from the Real,
or looking at its material from the vision-in-One, and so to understand
non-philosophy’s One is largely to formally understand the practice of
non-philosophy. To begin with, since the Real-One is foreclosed to thought
it also comes to be referred to as the One-in-One. Non-Philosophy clones
its transcendental organon from this One-in-One.10 Or, in other words,
it clones a (non-)One that will be used as an organon of selection when
applied to its material and that will operate on the philosophical resistance
to the foreclosed nature of the Real, formalized as non(-One). The dual-
ism, as a thought, is in a unilateral causal relationship with the One where
one aspect of the dualism, the one taking the place of transcendence, will
correspond to a non(-One) while the other, taking the place of a relative
philosophical immanence, will correspond to a (non-)One. The non(-One)
indicates that the transcendent element of thought is a kind of negation,
a hallucinatory aspect of thought that arises from the foreclosed nature
of the Real-One. It is that aspect of thought that responds to the trauma
of the foreclosing by negating the radical immanence of the One, reduc-
ing it to some hallucinatory transcendence of Being, Alterity, Difference,
and so on, but this aspect is at the same time actually transcendent within
that philosophical occasion, but only as rooted in the radical immanence
of the One.11 The (non-)One is the suspension of negation or the nega-
tive of philosophy and thus it does correspond to those conceptions of
immanence, found, for example, in Henry and Deleuze, that resist in a
philosophical way the philosophical negative, but they are radicalized here
so that the (non-)One indicates its mutation of the radical immanence
of the One. The last vestiges of philosophical transcendence have to be
identified within these philosophies of immanence in order to create an
immanental style of thought. A thought that is, in its very practice, rigor-
ously immanent.
The shift from Philosophy II to III is subtler than the one that marks the
move from Philosophy I to II. Laruelle came to regard the second axiom
of Philosophy II, which stated that scientific thought had some privilege
in thinking the Real via an affinity with the vision-in-One, as a reversal of
the reigning post-Kantian epistemico-logical hierarchy. This reversal ulti-
mately constituted a “ruse of philosophy” that allowed it to refuse “to ‘lay
down arms’ before the Real.”12 Philosophy III begins with the suspension
of this second axiom of Philosophy II in order to begin thinking from the
radical autonomy of the Real—not as a reversal of Philosophy II’s valoriza-

tion of science, but in order to free the Real from all authority, even that of
science. Laruelle summarizes the history up to this point writing,
If Philosophy I is intra-philosophical and if II marks the discovery of the

non-philosophical against philosophy and to the benefit of science, III frees
itself from the authority of science, that is in reality from every philosophi-
cal spirit of hierarchy, and takes for its object the whole of philosophical
sufficiency. So, it paradoxically corresponds to the philosophy’s affirmation
of the self, but “negatively” or in order finally to suspend it globally.13
Philosophy III is then the proper start of non-philosophy nearly freed from
the vicious circle of the philosophical decision. It has two major concepts
that arise from the axiomatic suspension of Philosophy II’s second axiom:
force (of) thought and unified theory.14 It is from these two concepts that
the positive project begins as differentiated from its negative and critical
forms found in Philosophy I and II.
The concept of force (of) thought is complex, but some understanding
can be had if one understands its more prevalent philosophical precursor
found in the Marxist conception of labor power. According to the Marxist
ontology labor power constitutes the movement of historical materialism
and labor power in itself is not reducible to a worker’s functions or output.
In capitalism this labor power is alienated from the worker by his creation
of a product that is then given a value outside of the product itself as crys-
tallized in the form of money. The force (of) thought is similar in that it is
the organon or means though which the Real possesses a causality of the
One that avoids alienating itself in its material. That is because the force
(of) thought is a clone of the One, rather than its production or reproduc-
tion into some material form proper to it. In this way it is productive of
thought in a circular manner, but in such a way that it contains the essence
of the Real without adding to or subtracting anything from it.15 What is
most important about the force (of) thought is its alien status. The force
(of) thought appears as an alien or, as Laruelle writes it, “Stranger” from
outside of the philosophical situation, that is to say from outside of the
structure determined by the philosophical decision, and in so doing pro-
vides an occasional solution to certain problems in philosophy. In short
the force (of) thought is, as Laruelle says, “the first possible experience of
thought.”16
Finally, there is the concept of unified theory, already discussed earlier,
but to review remember that Laruelle means by this a unified theory of sci-
ence and philosophy, of ethics and philosophy, of psychoanalysis and phi-
losophy, of religion and philosophy, and so on: “The unified theory replaces
the affinity of the One and science with the unilateral equality of philoso-
phy and science, philosophy and art, ethics, etc., with regard to the One
and introduces the ‘democratic’ theme within thought itself rather than as
a simple object of thought.”17 The democracy (of) thought is ultimately an
axiom and not a conclusion. One must begin as if a unified thinking of X
and philosophies were equal in the sight of the One in order to attempt and
think outside the problems inherent to philosophy due to its enclosure in
the structure of the philosophical decision. By treating thought as if it were
democratic, rather than a thought of democracy, one begins to truly think
from the One, as the One is itself outside of any unitary discourse and is
instead the universal discourse found in regional discourses.
With the publication in 2002 of Le Christ futur. Une leçon d’ hérèsie (pub-
lished in English translation in 2010 as Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy)
Laruelle inaugurated a new stage of non-philosophy, Philosophy IV. It is
here that Laruelle appears to have finally escaped from the self-sufficiency
of philosophy present even in Philosophy III’s constant reference to pre-
cursors in metaphysical systems such as Cartesianism and Marxism. With
Philosophy IV Laruelle has begun to produce a whole host of new concepts
from the vision-in-One (keeping in mind that this is an equivalent term
to the Real and the One itself) alongside religion, ethics, and aesthetics.
While the entire project of non-philosophy is in itself interesting, and can
be highly productive of thought outside of Laruelle’s corpus as witnessed
to by the work being carried out in wildly different ways under the banner
of non-philosophy, it is in Philosophy IV that the true worth for think-
ing from the Real becomes apparent.18 What, though, is the change in
axiom here? Does the change from Philosophy III to Philosophy IV con-
stitute a change in axiom in the same way that Philosophy II changed to
Philosophy III? The answer to this question may be found in the text La
Lutte et l’Utopie à la fin des temps philosophiques (2004), translated into
English as Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy (2012), where
he again turns to the axioms that allow non-philosophy to function. Here
they take a slightly modified form. To be more precise, they are modified
in that they are now more generalized: “1. the Real is radically immanent,
2. its causality is unilaterality or Determination-in-the-last-instance, 3. the
object of that causality is the Thought-world, or more precisely, philosophy
complicated by experience.”19 As will be discussed in the final chapter, for
Laruelle the World and philosophy are one and the same—the World is the
form of philosophy. Whereas the move from Philosophy II to III was effec-
tuated by the suspension of the axiom of science’s privileged relationship to
the Real, Philosophy IV begins with the intensification of attention given
to the complication of philosophy in experience. That is, Philosophy IV is
concerned with what might be traditionally called philosophical problems,
but because philosophy’s attention, for Laruelle, is always distracted, that

is, philosophical problems are always a mirror for philosophy to gaze back
upon itself, here these problems are the complication of philosophy in the
experience of the lived human. The refusal of separating the conditions for
human thought into empirical (i.e., a living human brain with adequate
material support, including nutrition and the material conditions of a soci-
ety that allows for such thought) and the traditional transcendental con-
ditions that post-Kantian philosophy has attended to. This is an axiom,
ultimately, concerned with the human as radical immanence, the human
as equivalent to the Real-One.
Finally, the practice of non-philosophy, Laruelle claims, is accom-
plished at its fullest in Philosophy V with Philosophie non-standard. I have
already described the matrix of Philosophy V that guides contemporary
non-philosophical practice, but allow me to quickly fill out this history of
the axiomatic mutations at work by locating the axiomatic shift and ulti-
mately maturation at work in Philosophy V. Philosophy V’s main axiom is
ultimately a corollary to the third axiom of Philosophy IV, the one that stated
its material is philosophy complicated by experience. First, a mutation of the
third axiom, where the “complication” is philosophy “being introduced” to
some other regional knowledge (like gnosticism or science). The corollary
axiom may perhaps, following this mutation, be rendered something like
this, the object of the causality of determination-in-the-last-instance, the
thought-World (philosophy complicated by experience), may be mutated
into a different form, a generic (i.e., nonuniversal) truth or utopia. In this
way the hallucinatory transcendence of the thought-World is reduced to a
symptom and when known in this immanent way is productive of generic
truth.20 This thought-World, that is, “Philosophy,” ultimately comes to be
“marginalized” in the name of this generic truth. So standard philosophy
is understood by Laruelle as “a method that is productive of ‘thought’ and
certain effects which accompany it, but it has that fate of wanting to give
a specific image of the real, like the positive sciences.”21 By mutating, in
this work, standard philosophical practice with the specific scientific mate-
rial of quantum physics Laruelle creates a non-standard philosophy that
is “precisely not constructed ‘in the margins’ of the philosophical model,
it is rather that model which systematically cultivates the margin or even
the marginality, whereas the generic is, if we can put it this, the margin
as something sort of ‘turned around’ [retournée] or rather turned-towards
philosophy, a space of welcome and intelligibility for philosophy itself.”22
In other words, non-standard philosophy uses material from science along-
side of the productive powers of philosophy to produce generic spaces that
reject marginality, hierarchy, and all other forms of transcendent judgment
against the human as Real.
The Posture of Science

It is obvious, from the first of Laruelle’s works surveyed here to the final
remarks regarding philosophy and quantum physics, that Laruelle’s
understanding of science is of the utmost importance for understand-
ing non-philosophy. Thus, following this historical sketch of the devel-
opment of non-philosophy we must now turn our attention again to the
specific approach Laruelle has taken toward science. It is during his work
on Philosophy II that Laruelle first describes the relationship of science
and philosophy and argues for a different understanding than previously
given in philosophy. A basic theme that runs throughout Laruelle’s work
is that philosophy only ever sees itself in a grounding role for science, a
philosophy of science that tends to make thinking about thinking philosoph-
ically, about its own philosophical practice. Thus epistemology is philoso-
phy’s philosophy of science in those forms of philosophy that are not even
explicitly about science as such, because they place themselves in a position
to speak for science, to think for it since science does not think. Even in
philosophies like Badiou’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s that aim toward a
more fruitful relationship between the sciences and philosophy, somewhat
rare in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, there is still an unequal
division of labor at work. For Badiou may think that mathematics is ontol-
ogy, but regards other forms of science as unthinking and even as pretend-
ers to the name of science. He thus sets up a hierarchy within science,
where some particular science, mathematics, is said to attain the status
of thought but the others are not: “[P]hysics provides no bulwark against
spiritualist (which is to say obscurantist) speculation, and biology—that
wild empiricism disguised as science —even less so. Only in mathematics can
one unequivocally maintain that if thought can formulate a problem, it
can and it will solve it.”23
We find in Deleuze’s philosophy a marked difference. Whereas Badiou’s
philosophy is always a quadruple object, split four ways between the
domains of science (mathematics), art, love, and politics, Deleuze’s is an
agonistic plane of immanence without these strict demarcations. Badiou
understands philosophy to necessarily think Being mathematically in a
way that erases Nature, thus undercutting the status of the natural sciences
(this is discussed in more detail in chapter 12). But Deleuze hews a bit
closer to the wild empiricism of biology, accepting it is not masquerading
as a science but is one; for Deleuze that judgment is not for the philosopher
to make, but he does so hew on philosophical grounds separate from the
science itself. Iain Hamilton Grant has traced how this exclusive disjunc-
tion between animal and number has dominated philosophical debates
concerning the metaphysics of nature and ultimately how this distinction

between pure formalism and organicism provides “the alibi [ . . . ] for the
preservation of the ‘ancient (Greek) division of philosophy into physics and
ethics.’”24 For Grant, following Schelling and Deleuze, what is needed is a
“physics of the All.” This is, ultimately, Deleuze’s philosophical problem,
how to think the All, both what is formal and what is organic, which is
called in his philosophy the plane of immanence.25 But ultimately this
plane of immanence is given the first name of “chaos” and chaos is the
common milieu that science, logic, art, and philosophy deal with each in
their own way. Deleuze and Guattari define chaos as that which makes
chaotic, undoing every consistency in the infinite, rather than as an inert
or stationary space.26 In other words, chaos is not simply some “thing,”
but an infinite process that, in some way, differs fundamentally with
the way we think. Thus, unlike Badiou (as well as Badiou’s great enemy,
Heidegger), Deleuze allows for different forms of thought in response to
this experience of chaos. In other words, for Deleuze and Guattari, the
division of labor is more horizontal than it is in Badiou. So within each
domain there is located some essential practice that constitutes its response
to chaos. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari present this sense of essentialism in a
way that is ultimately inconsistent with other, more wild aspects of their
philosophy. For What Is Philosophy is a book that proposes to provide a kind
of metaphilosophy of philosophy as well as a philosophy of science and a
philosophy of art within that metaphilosophy. Yet, that theory, despite its
basis in an agonistic plane of immanence, is ultimately presented as one of
limits. For the book spends most of its time discussing the barriers between
philosophy and science (as well as philosophy and art) and when a discus-
sion of the interaction between the two is given there is only the suggestion
of a wider theory to explain that interaction. Thus they claim that the lines
of philosophy and science are “inseparable but independent, each complete
in itself” going on to say if they are “inseparable it is in their respective
sufficiency.”27 Here science is found to be productive of thought, but there
is no user manual for that productivity. A more productive theory that
would allow for a more intentional engagement with science and philoso-
phy is lacking.
What we find in Laruelle is a very different form of thought. His thought,
as has been said before, aims to break out of the circle of self-sufficiency
endemic to philosophy in order to form unified theories of thought that
move outside of standard philosophy. Yet that difference is to be found in
the way it fills out the practices of figures such as Badiou and Deleuze and
Guattari. In this way Laruelle’s non-philosophy incorporates elements of
the division of labor found in both Badiou and Deleuze. Laruelle valorizes
science in a similar way to Badiou’s raising of mathematics to ontology, but
he generalizes that in a nonhierarchical way to include a general posture

of science rather than the conclusions of a single scientific practice. From
Badiou then there is this deep connection with the sciences that is theo-
rized within the very practice of his thought. While Laruelle also presents
a theory of science that focuses on its productive element like Deleuze and
Guattari, this theory of the production of thought is given within a wider
theory that avoids falling back on a certain spontaneity alongside of appeals
to some Event that we find in Deleuze and Guattari. Along with Deleuze,
Laruelle thinks from immanence, but no longer as a simulacrum, for in
non-philosophy immanence is the radically lived, the Real itself, and thus
must be thought from. Laruelle, in short, is able to break from the weak-
nesses of these thinkers and push forward their more radical elements.
In Théorie des identités (1992), the work that marks the end of
Philosophy II before the transition to Philosophy III, Laruelle performs
what he claims philosophers have not done—a transcendental, “which is
to say rigorously immanent,” description of the essence of science, one that
is, as non-philosophy, non-epistemological.28 Laruelle marks a path unlike
any other, seemingly avoiding the problems inherent in scientistic philos-
ophies (which are, in many ways, akin to Christian philosophy in their
practice) and antiscientific discourses that are more common in French
and German philosophy (and those in the Anglophone world who follow
them). This is because Laruelle grants science its autonomy by radicaliz-
ing a certain strand of philosophy that claims “ethics as first philosophy”
recognizes science as philosophy’s Other. Laruelle claims that philosophy
is unable to accept science as its Other and must reassert its own identity
by treating science to the same structure of division found in philosophy
discussed earlier, which allows it to treat everything else as philosophiz-
able. This means that it must rend apart science, separating out a brute
factual and transcendent existence (the mixed philosophical identity of
science) and the practice of objectivity, which is philosophy’s denial of the
realist character of science.29 In Laruelle’s mutation of Levinas’s ethics of
the Other to the abstract level, where the demand is made of philosophy
that it recognize science as its Other and acknowledge the autonomy of sci-
ence, he thereby makes philosophy the hostage of the science. Philosophy
must submit to science here: “Our hypothesis takes the postural or ‘sub-
jective’ realism of science for a transcendental guide or rule of its imma-
nent theory.”30 This is a certain abstract openness to the Other, one that
attempts to move from the closed and circular vision of the philosophical
to that of a non-philosophical hypothesis that opens up a possibility within
philosophy to think alongside its Other, science. This being the case, phi-
losophy must understand science from the position of science; its hypoth-
esis must be one of a certain abstract empathy.
It is the scientific attitude that consists in entrusting to science itself the elu-
cidation of its essence, to science the recognition all way through of its radi-
cality and derive all the consequences of its autonomy: science is for itself,
at least in its cause—the Identity-of-the-last-instance—, an emergent theo-
retical object, a “hypothesis,” or an “axiom” in the “hypothetico-deductive”
sense.31
Before turning to his non-epistemological description of science, which is

undertaken from this empathetic and hypothetical realist posture, let’s turn
our attention first to his description of philosophy’s understanding of sci-
ence. His critique here is ethical, it is a certain recognition that science and
philosophy can’t be reconciled into a synthesis, but that philosophy’s crimes
against science be recognized and understood. Science becomes both the
internal enemy of philosophy, threatening meaning, and that which philos-
ophy strives for as a seemingly apodictic knowledge: “Our experience of sci-
ence is at the same time marked by a devalorization (as devoid of meaning
and absolute truth) and overvalorziation (as factuality and efficacy) which
are characterized by its philosophical and ‘cultural’ interpretation.”32 This
image of science arises out of an alienating structure of intellectual labor, a
division of intellectual labor into three parts. First, the philosopher admits
that science produces knowledge as understanding. In French there are two
words that can be translated into English as knowledge: connaissance and
savoir. Science is said to produce knowledge of the first kind, which is,
roughly speaking, a kind of “know-how” or “understanding,” not knowl-
edge of the essence of things, not true philosophical knowledge, but mere
understanding. The second, savoir, is what philosophy aims at, the kind
of knowledge that is sure and absolute. Knowledge (as understanding) is
produced by science, but not philosophical knowledge, not philosophical
thought. For, from Plato to Kant and to Heidegger, the claim is that “science
does not think.” Science dreams, its dream is to think even as it produces
blind knowledge. The second division rips science in two, separating the
multiple empirical sciences, which produce knowledge, from “an absolute,
unique and self-founded science—first philosophy as ontology or logic.”33
This separation is the condition for philosophy’s concept of science, “philos-
ophy splits the concept of science after have separated understanding [con-
naissance] and thought.”34 Finally, the third division divides up the objects
proper to philosophy and science: “To philosophy Being or the authentic
and total real; to science not even beings, but the properties of beings or
facts; the object of knowledge [savoir] is now that which is divided.”35
What differentiates Laruelle from post-Kantian philosophy of science
and from the general post-Kantian posture toward science, including those
in the Anglophone work who deploy aspects of science as philosophical
arguments and positions about reality taken to be the Real, what dif-
ferentiates Laruelle from those philosophers engaging in a war over the
status of science is that he accepts the autonomy of science, he accepts
that it is free in its practice from philosophical conditions. He opposes
this to the tripartite division discussed earlier in order to show “that
every science, ‘empirical’ or not, is also a thought; that it is absolute in
its kind [genre]; that it bears—at least ‘in-the-last-instance’—on the Real
‘itself.’”36 To quickly summarize, in this early work Laruelle rejects the
philosophical-epistemological tripartite division of labor, which results in
philosophy’s invariant approach to science or its separation of the tran-
scendental and the empirical. Rather than following some variant of this
usual philosophical approach to science, which may differ in terms of what
is valued in this split, but still accepts some form of this split, Laruelle
proposes a thought experiment where philosophy is mutated. This thought
experiment is, as I have said earlier, ethical and demands that philosophy
practice in the face of its Other. The essence of philosophy is to break up
its object and then to take this break as constitutive of the Real, rather than
localized in philosophical practice. Philosophy renders the object into a
dyad, an empirico-transcendental doublet, that is always united (not uni-
fied) by some third term, whether that term be named “transcendence” or
“immanence” and follow the different paths the chosen name determines.
The posture of science, which underlies the various scientific practices,
does not split its object, even when it breaks up an object into its constitu-
ent parts; it does so with the underlying realist thesis that the object is
One-in-the-last-instance.37 This thesis, Laruelle claims, is incomprehen-
sible to philosophy because philosophy requires some third term, some
transcendent (in its operation) unity to the object, rather than the radical
immanence of the One-in-the-last-instance. Here, the two central con-
cepts of non-philosophy appear: the One (Real-One, One-in-One, etc.)
and determination-in-the-last-instance (which is the causal equivalent to
the vision-in-One, and is also called unilateral duality).
Importantly for our project, and in accord with the reality of science,
Laruelle especially rejects the second division within the tripartite division—
the division of science into empirical and transcendental.38 This division
is the vehicle for the philosophical doublet the “empirico-transcendental,”
which is maximalized by philosophy in its splitting up of the Real-One in
the Philosophical Decision. What Laruelle locates in science, and why he
at first gives in to the temptation to simply reverse the post-Kantian hier-
archy, is its nondecisional relationship to the One, such that science prac-
tices the vision-in-One rather than the philosophical splitting of the One
into condition and conditioned, empirical and transcendental. Laruelle
therefore claims that “[e]very science, even ‘empirical’ ones called such by
philosophy in order to denigrate them, are in reality also ‘transcendental’:

they bear upon the Real itself and, more than that, know that it bears a
relation to it there.”39 This is, of course, and as Laruelle makes clearer in
subsequent works, only a general or abstract resemblance, which he will
later call generic. More so, in the Real, there is no separation between the
empirical and the transcendental, there is no “thing-in-itself” in the radical
immanence of the Real. In Philosophy II, outlined earlier, Laruelle reversed
the post-Kantian hierarchy of philosophy and science, raising science to
the status of thought; against those philosophers who claim that “science
does not think” science is seen here to be a thought that moves beyond
itself, beyond the vicious circle of deciding upon itself, to the thought that
practices vision-in-One. While the mere reversal of the hierarchy is ulti-
mately rejected, this thought experiment is what leads Laruelle to the dis-
covery of the vision-in-One underlying science’s practice, and as what can
modify philosophical practice. What the vision-in-One does is think from
the One rather than about the One. The One is foreclosed to thought, the
relationship between the One goes in one direction, it is unilateral, such
that thought has no effect on the One but is determined by the One. This
means that any thought of the One can only be described via axioms,
statements that cannot be thought directly insofar as their truth cannot
be proven by falsification, but are necessary and provisional for thinking
outward.
It should be clear already that this isn’t a scientism. Even though dur-
ing this wave of non-philosophical practice (Philosophy II) Laruelle gives
philosophy over to science in an attempt to take on the same posture found
in the identity of science, it is clearly not attempting to speak for science,
to think for science, or to present science as the only human discipline
that can speak with any authority that we human beings may trust in.
Instead, it is philosophical thought made a stranger by being in the style of
science. This is how Laruelle exits from philosophy’s intractable war of
opinion, the war over the history of philosophy, simply dropping out
of these conversations and building his own thought in defiance of the
war. The war of opinion can only be fought on common ground, which
Laruelle locates in the philosophical decision, so by thinking from outside
this common ground Laruelle refuses to engage in the war insofar as he
is philosophically incomprehensible. Yet, this incomprehensibility occurs
within philosophical language itself not unlike Spinoza or Levinas, even if
Laruelle’s specific project is more helpful for the creation of a unified the-
ory of philosophical theology and ecology. Laruelle mutates philosophy by
placing it in an ethical, scientific posture. This is clear in the second of the
central concepts of non-philosophy, “determination-in-the-last-instance,”
where it both explains and argues for the method of non-philosophical
thinking and is an instance of that thinking; it represents the circular rigor

of non-philosophical thought, the refusal, even with regard to itself, to
split objects. The concept is lifted from a philosophical genealogy, primar-
ily Marxist, and then is recast “from the One” or in the style of science.
It is then a chimera of science and philosophy, containing two codes in a
concept that is One-in-the-last-instance.
The concept is introduced by Laruelle in Philosophy II, but develops and
mutates through the various waves of non-philosophical practice, depend-
ing on the material it comes into contact with. So at times the weight is
given to the “last-instance,” at others to the “determination,” sometimes
determination is dropped and becomes “identity-in-the-last-instance” and
at other times it becomes “determination-in-the-last-identity.” In each case
there is a specific and technical reason for the change, again related to
the material Laruelle is engaging with, but in each case there remains a
generic aspect to the concept that explains how non-philosophy engages
unilaterally with the dualisms of philosophy. The dualisms of philoso-
phy, the effect of the philosophical decision, are turned into materials by
a unilateral operation called unilateralization and the possibilities for this
operation are opened up by the concept of the last-instance. Whether this
last-instance centers on determination or identity is not important, for
ultimately they are the same thing for Laruelle. What is important is the
generic core of the concept, that of the last-instance, which is not tempo-
ral, but real: “The really universal thought is theory according to the One,
determined-in-the-last-instance by that identity.”40
The generic concept can begin to be glimpsed in its Marxist origins, as
explained and subsequently developed by Althusser. The original phrase,
“determination in the last instance,” is to be found in a letter from Engels
to a J. Bloch where he is attempting to explain the central place of the
economic in Marxist theory, but avoid the strict economic determinism
that some had found therein.41 Althusser argues that determination in
the last instance is a powerful theoretical tool for refuting schematism
and economism as it both shows how “the superstructures” are not mere
phenomena of the base economic level, but have their own affectivity.42
Superstructures are elements of human society that support the ordering of
the base of society (worker relations to capital, for instance), often through
obscuring the determinate effects of that base. These superstructures
include important aspects of human society even in Marxist terms, such
as religion, art, education, and the political system of the state, and so they
need to be analyzed by Marxist means as well. By theorizing determina-
tion in the last instance Engels and Althusser after him are able to analyze
these clearly important aspects of human society without forfeiting the
importance of the political-economic aspect. Essentially the idea is that the
superstructures have effects, but they are akin to accidental effects and they
do not have any strong effect on the core form of the political-economic
realm.43 Laruelle, calling determination-in-the-last-instance the “lost axi-
omatic of materialism,” extracts and mutates determination in the last
instance from its context in historical materialism and “transfers and radi-
calizes [it] in first Science or according to the One, which gives the concept
its radical sense and allows its full use.”44 This mutation of the concept
actually places Marxist thought within a transcendental framework as
well, where its own claims to sufficiently describe reality are relativized
and its orthodoxy challenged. For no longer does the determination-in-
the-last-instance arise from the economic realm, but instead the claim
about how thought itself, even thought concerning the economic realm, is
shown to be determined-in-the-last-instance by the One.
Stated otherwise, “‘In-the-last-instance’ thus identically signifies that
the cause is not alienated in the subject of its effect or in its effect itself and
that on its side the effect retains a relative autonomy.”45 What this means is
that human thought, arising as it does from any of its regional knowledges,
has relative autonomy, but it has no strong effect on the Real-One itself.
The strong causality goes in one direction, such that the object is One-in-
the-last-instance and the thought cannot split the Real-One in itself, it
is a unilateral duality. What is interesting, then, about determination-in-
the-last-instance, for Laruelle, is that it is a double causality made up of
two terms, which Laruelle says are
[h]eterogeneous but the one to the other is also necessary in order to

form a single [unique] causality, these are—or these have—that paradoxi-
cal nature of being exactly a single causality but formed by two bits that
remain two and do not re-form a synthesis or a system. And yet it is not
about the “difference,” or the co-extension of the One and the Two, of the
One which is Two and the Two which is One in a reversible way. Rather,
determination-in-the-last-instance must appear to be irreversible, the One
is only One, even with the Two, and the Two forms a Two with the One
only from its point of view as Two.46
What is important about determination-in-the-last-instance from the per-

spective of a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology, or gener-
ally from that of the humanities and science, is the truly pluralistic account
of the material of science and philosophy. In Laruelle’s terms these truly
different identities, which are not unified in a third difference but remain
identities, remain Two but as each One—a duality rather than a dualism.
There is then no crass reductionism at work in non-philosophy. Neither
the crass reductionism of scientism, which reduces things to “just X,” in
the case of nature “just matter,” “just genes,” “just chance,” and so on, or
the crass reductionism of theologism, which reduces nature to “just cre-
ation” (and the double sense of “just” is intended here). Since a critique of
scientism, and other forms of reductionary “naturalism,” is ubiquitous to
environmental ethics, philosophical and theological, I do not devote atten-
tion to it here in the discussion of Laruelle but it will become important
again in part IV, while in the next chapter I will discuss the relationship
between theology and non-philosophy in order to short-circuit the theo-
logical negation of nature by way of the name “creation.” This is neces-
sary to both disclose the principle of sufficient theology and, in the last
chapter, to free the name “creation” to become a form of material that may
be used.
The Generic Matrix
First, however, we need to return again to the non-philosophical iden-

tity of science. Again we turn to Philosophy V, the most recent wave of
non-philosophy, which is the most daring attempt to bring together the
material of a particular science and immanental thought. As such it bears
particular importance for our project, as we aim to do with scientific ecol-
ogy what Laruelle has done with quantum physics. Laruelle has developed
this wave in his short treatise Introduction aux sciences génériques, two pub-
lic lectures he gave in the United Kingdom at the Universities of Warwick
and Nottingham in March of 2010, and his major work Philosophie
non-standard, published in October of 2010. In these works Laruelle has
experimented with a new name for his theory, non-standard philosophy,
adapted from non-standard physics. Throughout Laruelle’s corpus and
in almost all the secondary literature on Laruelle, both Francophone and
Anglophone, the authors clarify that non-philosophy should not be con-
fused with an anti-philosophy or a negation of philosophy. Just as Laruelle
is now adapting a name from scientific discourse (non-standard physics),
non-philosophy took its inspiration from non-Euclidean geometry, but it is
hoped that this change in name will mark a new phase where the ideational
pacifism of Laruelle’s theory is expressed without confusion. For the pur-
pose of non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy is not the destruction
of philosophy, but its mutation and the solving of true philosophical prob-
lems by the means of other discursive fields that it comes together with as
a unified theory.
In one sense Philosophy V seems like a nonidentical repetition of
Philosophy III as it turns away from the complicating experiences of
messianism, art, mysticism, politics, and the like, and again turns its
attention intensely toward science. Philo-fiction, the quantum, and the
generic, the three terms found in the subtitle of Philosophie non-standard,
are the important aspects of the matrix that characterizes this new phase
and attempt to address both philosophical problems and problems within
non-philosophy itself. Within Philosophy III’s attempt to render certain
“unified theories” there is a question of the particularity of the theoreti-
cal dyad chosen. One side of the dyad is always philosophy, for Laruelle,
but even here the question “which philosophy” will immediately be asked.
That is easily answered in the course of the non-philosophical construc-
tion, as non-philosophy takes all philosophies as, in some sense, true (or
true-without-truth in Laruelle’s formulation, meaning that the philosophy
is true without taking the transcendental position of truth). Mullarkey,
again, describes this aptly:
Laruelle’s project can best be summed up as a thought-experiment in the

fullest meaning of this phrase—the experience of thought and the thought
(of) experience—the experiment being concerned with what philosophy
would become were it not representational at all, but rather the thing itself.
By this I don’t mean to take philosophy as an aspect of Mind that is the Real
(even if its most “complete” aspect), for that would be just one more ideal-
ism, one more philosophical positing. Rather, the question is: what would we
find if all philosophies, in their plurality, were real (and so not in accordance
with their mutual exclusivity, their exclusive claims on truth and reality)?
[ . . . ] As the most rigorous thought of immanence possible, non-philosophy
allows every philosophy its truth and reality, not in the name of an episte-
mological relativism (more Continental philosophy), but through a hypo-
thetical Real-ism (a kind of post-Continental naturalism).47
So, the claims of the particular philosophy are unimportant for the
non-philosophical operation; it merely provides philosophical material
for non-philosophy. The particular philosophy is taken as if any mate-
rial whatsoever and as any material it is universal or “generic.” The same
is true of the second aspect of the dyad, be it religion or art or science.
However, the question of this relationship between the particularity and
universality of the chosen material, especially since this material is then
changed as unified theory, had remained undertheorized until recently.
Thus, a new concept brought in to support this axiom has been that of
the generic. The concept has a mixed history, taking on different forms in
philosophy, where it is split between a kind of philosophical anthropology
and first philosophy, and in sociology.48 The philosophical split is between
the Feuerbachian conception of “generic humanity,” taken up by Marxist
thought, and the extension of this by Alain Badiou to the ontological,
where “in the algebraic model of knowledge, the generic is the acquisition
of a supplement of universal properties (those of demonstration and mani-
festation) by a subtraction and indetermination, a formalization of data.”49
The second source of the generic is to be found, Laruelle says, in societal
epistemology, and is related to what in English is called the general equiva-
lent.50 This history is then subsumed in its own operation, rendering the
historical conception of the generic as a constant within thought that has
three distinct traits, which I will shorten here. First, “being-generic tends
to present itself as a stranger.”51 In other words, the being-generic of a sci-
ence or a philosophy carries with it the same “stranger” or “alien” or “for-
eign” quality described throughout his work as the first possible experience
of thought (and treated already earlier). Second, “being-generic posseses
an a priori function without being a philosophical a priori.”52 The discus-
sion here focuses on the difference between a philosophical a priori, which
grounds knowledge of the philosophical “over-Whole,” and the notion of
an object that remains unsplit. An object, Laruelle claims, is both particu-
lar and has universal significance as One (again explained in detail earlier).
Finally, the third trait of the generic is that it “represents the chance for a
duality without synthesis, it is the outline or the matrix of every duality
as such, of the Two that structures science or its subject.”53 The generic,
Laruelle claims, holds the particular and the universal in a duality with-
out synthesis (a claim that is important to understand what science does).
This duality, for Laruelle, is always unilateral; it is always “Determined-in-
the-last-instance” by the One. Laruelle incarnates the generic as an indi-
vidual person, one that is not solitary, but universal, writing, “The generic
is the individual who has accepted her being universal but limited, who has
accepted not being the tip or expression of the absolute, and thus resists a
priori its influence.”54
Laruelle succinctly described the generic in his lecture “From the First
to the Second Non-Philosophy,” given at the University of Warwick on
March 3, 2010. There he stated, “‘Generic’ signifies that science and phi-
losophy are no longer anything more than means or predicates that have
lost their disciplinary sufficiency and autonomy; bodies of knowledge
forced to abandon their specific finality in order to take up another that is
generic, a form of universality that traverses their traditional domains of
objects as modalities of the philosophical All.”55 Let’s explicate this sen-
tence beginning from its end and work our way backward to the middle
and then explain the first half before finally bringing them together. The
philosophical All or Whole [Tout] is simply another name for the vicious
circle formed by the philosophical decision. Its other name is “World.” The
“traditional domains of objects as modalities” refers to the usual way that
philosophy transforms the material of other disciplines, for example, Alain
Badiou’s subtraction of a particular form of set-theory so that it may be

recast as the science of the Being of being (ontology). Let’s now look at the
first part of the sentence, which is clear without explication, stating that
rendering philosophy and science “generic” takes them outside of their own
disciplinary domains, removing their disciplinary autonomy and purpose
and instead of cross-breeding them superpositions them. In Introduction aux
sciences génériques Laruelle critiques attempts to reclaim the word métissage,
which has been used in racist ideology in France (related to the more famil-
iar Spanish mestizo, common in the Americas), but also has been valued to
create a generic practice of thought, a generic form of thought. For Laruelle
this concept is ultimately superficial and falsely egalitarian.56 But by bring-
ing the two together in a truly generic form, separate from colonial-racist
ideology rooted in quasi-essentialist forms of identity, we can now see that
Laruelle is claiming that subtracting philosophy and science from their
self-proclaimed domain will allow us to transform the usual philosophi-
cal use of subtraction. What Laruelle has done, finally, is found a way to
remain true to the transcendental character of non-philosophy (“which
is to say rigorously immanent”).57 Yet he is able to turn away from draw-
ing on particular philosophies and instead draw on particular aspects of
a regional knowledge. Laruelle had already been engaged in this practice
in his works on religion, as he turned to particular experience of religion
(Christianity, particularly the legacy of messianism in the West, mysti-
cism, and gnosticism), but now he has turned to a particular science.
Laruelle describes the current wave of non-philosophy in this way: “So
let this be the formula of non-philosophy renewed or renamed as generic sci-
ence or non-standard Philosophy: the fusion of science and philosophy under
science, fusion under-determined in-the-last-instance by science, specifically
quantum physics. This is our guiding formula, that which we call the generic
matrix.”58 Note the subtle difference here between the “Determination-in-
the-last-instance” by the Real-One that is common to both philosophy and
science and the “under-determination in-the-last-instance” of philosophy
by science. This remains an egalitarian relationship, insofar as the Real
is concerned, but philosophy is said to “undergo” science or “goes under”
science in the same way that one “goes under” anesthesia. The relationship
between the person and the anesthesia is not a hierarchical one in any
strong sense, and in the same way the immanent field fashioned in this
generic science is a kind of idempotence.59 Our project, as developed in
this work, of an immanental ecology builds off of the shape of Philosophy
V’s wave; where Laruelle has submitted philosophy to the conditions of a
particular form of science, quantum physics, we do the same with philo-
sophical theology and ecology. Thus, in the same way that Laruelle speaks
of certain real quantum aspects within philosophy, going so far as to say
that “the science of philosophy [i.e., non-philosophy] is a quasi quantum

physics of concepts” where “the generic matrix is an experimental chamber
that allows for a struggle or collision of physical and philosophical particles
in order to produce new knowledge,” we will speak of philosophy and
ecology where the generic matrix is a real ecosystem (of) thought.60 Like
Laruelle we aim for this to move beyond mere metaphor and to actually
produce new knowledge, or, rather, a new way of thinking ecologically
that will add to knowledge a unified metaphysical ethics adequate to the
findings of ecology.
Chapter 7
Non-Theological Supplement
Before moving on to our construction of a unified theory of philosophical

theology and ecology we must deal more directly with Meillassoux’s strong
criticism of non-philosophy. Remember that this criticism was directed
at the threat of dogmatism in non-philosophy, specifically with regard to
its claim to think from the Real. But the reason we have to deal with
this strong criticism is not due to philosophical rules or on philosophi-
cal grounds. Rather this general axiomatic structure of non-philosophy,
where the Real-One is foreclosed to thought and yet thought has relative
autonomy before it as thought from the Real-One, is formally similar to
theology. This is especially true of those theologies, like environmental
theology, that aim to understand the relationship science and philosophy
have toward reality. If this is true, and I show its validity later, then there
is a question of why I am engaging in the non-philosophical project rather
than simply a theological one. To answer that question I must first address
Laruelle’s own work on religion, which has been the dominant material of
Philosophy IV and the source of a number of central concepts such as her-
esy. But additionally I must also provide a theory of theology that locates
its own particular self-sufficient character.
The Non-Philosophical Identity of Religion
As already discussed, Laruelle’s “science of philosophy” is often mis-

understood by philosophers, even those friendly to Laruelle’s vision, to
be an outright assault on philosophy; non-philosophy is confused with
antiphilosophy. Alain Badiou, upon being asked about Laruelle’s work in

an interview, remarked:
I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regard-

ing the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions
in regards to the Real. In a sense Laruelle is too much like Heidegger, in
critiquing a kind great forgetting, of what is lost in the grasp of decision,
what Heidegger called thinking. Beyond this, and not to judge a thinker by
his earliest work, his recent work has a religious dimension. When you say
something is purely in the historical existence of philosophy the proposition
is a failure. It becomes religious. There is a logical constraint when you say
we must go beyond philosophy. This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only
a God can save us.1
Let us set aside the incoherence of some of Badiou’s remarks concerning

religion, especially considering his own interactions with orthodox insti-
tutionalized Christianity, and let us also set aside the usually frustrating
(for philosophers) response of non-philosophers that of course Badiou, as
a philosopher, has difficulty understanding Laruelle’s non-philosophy.2
Taken outside of its polemical context this philosophical dismissal of
non-philosophy remains instructive insofar as it identifies a religious
dimension at work in non-philosophy. Badiou isn’t merely addressing
Laruelle’s work on religion, but making a claim that there is a religious
aspect underlying the practice of non-philosophy itself. I think he is right,
though I have difficulty understanding Badiou’s critique, and so think he
is right by accident and that the consequences of this religious character
(what might more accurately be called a theological character) are radically
different than what Badiou suggests.
Laruelle does not build a wall of absolute demarcation between phi-
losophy and religious thought, but neither is he simply accommodating to
religion as it presents itself. While he does not hold back when critiquing
philosophers, even those like Deleuze and Levinas for whom he neverthe-
less expresses a great deal of respect, Laruelle equally does not let religion
go by without an equal amount of vitriol. For if philosophy operates with
a kind of theoreticism that denigrates Man, religions are the site of terror,
providing all sorts of hallucinatory justifications for the murder of Man
from an imagined transcendent source. Laruelle’s understanding of reli-
gion thus shares much with those who think of religion as a construction
of forces, like Talal Asad and Deleuze and Guattari. Religion is a construc-
tion of forces, yes, and these forces ultimately point to a real human cause
of religious practices, but religion cannot be understood via a universal
category captured by an anthropological description, thick or otherwise.
Non-Theological Supplement 97
For the operation of non-philosophy upon religion does not aim to merely
describe religion any more than it aims to eliminate or protect it in the
name of either a liberated philosophy or an enslaved philosophy. Instead,
non-philosophy aims at appropriating religion: “Axioms and theorems,
these are our methods, us men-without-philosophy, so that we can appro-
priate religion and adapt the divine mysteries to our humanity rather than
to our understanding.”3
Importantly, this method does not involve blending philosophy and
religion together, but treats them as relatively autonomous within a duality
that is ultimately in a unilateral relation to the Real-One. Laruelle must
deal with religion, for religion is actual and thus Real, but also because
religion has been the occasion and material of struggle against Worldly
Authorities: “The paradox is that it is above all from the sides of the reli-
gious reality, in its dualysis, that the occasion itself is found for an emer-
gence of subjects as Futures.”4 In the construction, not of the future, but of
human Futures (like Moderns or Ancients), religion appears in world his-
tory as an instance where human beings, not gods, struggle in-immanence
with and for the World. In his Future Christ, Laruelle aims to make use
of the specificity of Christian religious material to first alter the practice
of philosophy by introducing the experience of heresy into philosophy,
and then to perform a non-philosophical operation on religion to put it to
human use. He locates what is different between philosophy and religion
via the same non-philosophical dualysis—that is, in terms of the relation-
ship between their Authorities and Strangers:
There is a difference here from philosophical systems that are partitioned

according to the dominant (but not unique) axes of truth and appearance
(or illusion from the point of view which has as an object the theory of that
partition), for a religion has as its principle or dominant difference that of
orthodoxy’s division, from the rigour of orthology (as the policing of opin-
ions or dogmas) and heresy, which it sometimes mixes with the philosophi-
cal that it anyhow cuts again.5
For, in the duality between Authority and Stranger, heresy becomes the
organon of radical immanence determining in-the-last-instance the human
identity of religion.
Thus, religions are not only sites of Authority, though this is their
non(-One) aspect, but they are also, in their particularity, occasional
causes for human struggle, struggles as Strangers. This aspect of religion
is obscured insofar as philosophers of religion tend to focus on the ortho-
dox aspects of any particular religion. Even when a philosopher aims for
a radical critique of religion or a radical appropriation (as in Badiou’s own
work on St. Paul), they do not look to the victims of religion, that is,
to the religious victims of religion decried as heretics by the orthodox.
Instead, they play with the orthodox material, ignoring the heretical
material, even if they are unconcerned themselves with falling into her-
esy. This is why Laruelle, in his own non-philosophical working with
religious material, gives a great deal of attention to the various strains of
thought collected under the name of Gnosticism. For, though Christian
philosophers and theologians may identify all aspects of modern Western
society with Gnosticism, there are no actual Gnostics left in the World.
The “Gnostic question” prefigures the “Jewish question” and what is fast
becoming in the West the “Muslim question” and shares with it the fact
that, for both questions, the answer from the side of orthodoxy was found
in fire. Thus, in the unilateral duality of religion, where the dualism is
one between Authorities and Strangers, orthodoxy and heresy, it is always
the heretic, as subject-in-struggle and not merely a passive victim, that
determines-in-the-last-instance the identity of the particular religion that
non-philosophy may then work with. In short, non-philosophy demands
a unilateral thinking from the subject-in-struggle, rather than the victim
or the orthodox.
Rather than philosophically working out problems inherent to certain
religious thoughts, Laruelle gives “first names” to identify these occasions
of the Real (i.e., their identity as Stranger) within a particular religion.
This, then, is the meaning of that strange appellation “Future Christ”:
from the material of religion non-philosophy removes “the future” from
its inscription in a Time-World, inscribed as it is within a philosophically
determined understanding of the future. Instead Laruelle inscribes the
future in the radical immanence of Man. The future is given its identity
only as it is “lived without purpose,” a future radically immanent (to) any-
one and thus without telos as a subject formed in that radical immanence.6
This appellation is derived from three sources that are blended within
“the-Christianity,” or Christianity as formed by the Authorities or ortho-
dox, which are separated via a non-philosophical naming of them:
The first is the properly Gnostic experience of the definition of man by

the primacy of knowledge over faith, an untaught or unlearned knowledge
that we must radicalise as Man-in-person, Lived-without-life or even as the
Real. The second is the more general heretical aspect, of the separation with
the World, here extended and universalized beyond its Christian and even
Gnostic aspects. The third is the specifically Christian aspect of universal
salvation, for the World and for every man, that works through the person
of Christ, which we must also radicalize in a Christ-subject.7
In this sketch of Laruelle’s working with religion and philosophy the par-
ticular power of non-philosophy is revealed. For there is certainly a wild,
heretical freedom at work that offends the scholarly tone of philosophy
of religion and the piety of theologians patiently working out the Truth
through faith and/over reason, and this heretical freedom comes from
non-philosophy’s beginning from axioms derived from the Real-One,
rather than from the philosophical history of Being or Alterity. But,
non-philosophy’s declaration of the One also restrains non-philosophical
naming and provides it with a certain amount of theoretical rigor as that
naming must, by the very same axioms, work through the material as actu-
ally given.
In his incredibly clear introduction to non-philosophy, Jean-Luc
Rannou remarks that non-philosophy has the singular ability to respond
not only to transcendental questions such as “What is religion?” but
also to those singular questions such as “What is the Qur’an?”8
Non-Philosophy has this generic ability because it aims to think equiv-
alently as both science and philosophy, theology and philosophy, art
and philosophy, erotics and philosophy and it calls these equivalencies
“unified theories” that perform a real democracy (of ) thought.9 This is
the task before any philosophy of religion separated from its authoritar-
ian form, a philosophy of religion that is non-philosophical, to consider
both generic religion (rather than religion subsumed into a universal
category) and occasional particulars (like Christ and the Qur’an) from
within the radical immanence of Man determined-in-the-last-instance
by the Real.
At this stage I must step back from an exposition of Laruelle’s work on
religion and consider the possibility of a non-theology as both the name of
a non-philosophical philosophy of religion, as presented in his work, and
as a science of non-philosophy. The first is obvious enough and follows
Laruelle’s own limited remarks on the possibility of a non-theology. He
calls non-philosophy “a human mathematics,” a formulation he opposes
to “Leibniz’s conception of philosophy as a ‘divine mathematics.’”10 From
non-philosophy springs a number of new possibilities for thought, one of
which he calls “non-theological.” This non-theological thought appears
to be essentially what I’ve described earlier: a thinking of religious mate-
rial under the aspect of Man in his radical immanence as minority, an
“inversion of the philosophies of transcendence and of the divine call,” the
construction of a future against and for the World, and so on.11 The point
here is to use religious material to challenge philosophical practice and to
transform the material of religion so that it is no longer a golem, but once
again any material whatsoever.
Non-Theology as Theory of the Principle

of Sufficient Theology and Internal
Non-Philosophical Heresy
By giving the name non-theology to a non-philosophical philosophy of
religion I am indicating that non-theology should begin with the same
axioms as non-philosophy. However, as I said in the introduction to this
chapter, it has to deal with the theological material that infects philosophy
of religion as theological material and in turn creates axioms in response
to them. It is here that non-theology becomes a name for the science of
non-philosophy. Laruelle began the work of non-philosophy by first locat-
ing, and then taking a heretical stance toward, the principle of sufficient
philosophy. This principle, Laruelle tells us, lies at the core of philoso-
phy more so than any other philosophical principle (such as the principle
of sufficient reason) and it is, in itself, not a philosophical principle at
all insofar as philosophy is unable to see it. The principle of sufficient
philosophy lies outside of philosophy’s vision much in the same way that
Narcissus does not see the pool that reflects his image back to him. It
is thus only non-philosophy’s refusal of this principle that brings it into
vision. Again, the principle of sufficient philosophy can be summed up in
the belief that everything is philosophizable. In this way philosophy gives
itself a fundamental or necessary status in the discourses in which it shares
(philosophy of art, political philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy
of religion, etc.) and as co-constitutive of the Real. Laruelle has said time
and time again that non-philosophy does not aim to overcome or destroy
philosophy. The principle of sufficient philosophy is merely identified as a
fact about philosophy, which may explain its many failures and that, once
identified and turned into material, may be used in other ways as well. It
is, as such, simple material for future human use.
Laruelle, we have seen, attempts to use this material while thinking
according to the Real, seeing through the vision-in-One according to and
not about the Real. In this way, the Real appears to take on a quasi-divine
character insofar as the Real can only be described via axioms. The nature
of an axiom, however, is that it is fundamental for some system but cannot
itself be proven directly. One must simply work out the system from the
consequences of the axiom upon the material presented and its validity
will be given if the system works.12 Yet this axiomatic approach is the only
way to actually refuse the philosophical decision as it makes the decision
relative to the Real. This method decides nothing, rendering everything
equivalent before the Real, finally escaping from the principle of sufficient
philosophy as it throws itself prostrate before the Real—non-philosophy

has and recognizes its limits.13
There nevertheless remains a temptation to philosophize, for who can
think according to the Real and not ask about the nature of the Real itself?
Such is a temptation to heresy, but also to orthodox codification; that is,
it is a temptation to theology. Laruelle’s axioms become, as is suggested in
his Future Christ, a form of unlearned knowledge [savoir indocte], dif-
ferentiated from the learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa. Unlearned
knowledge is not mystical obfuscation, but the unlearned knowledge of
the Real that is radically immanent in Man-in-person, as Man-in-person is
the “performation” of the Real, and from which one necessarily proceeds.
There is then a similarity one may draw between non-philosophy’s method
and theology. Theology has its own self-sufficient problem analogous to
philosophy’s—the principle of sufficient theology. This is different from
philosophy’s narcissism and may find some elucidation by a comparison
with the other figure in the myth of Narcissus, the nymph Echo.
The history of all theology hitherto has been that of the interplay
between echo and control (the figure of Hera). Theology, it is often said,
has no object proper. It is simultaneously simply in the service of the cen-
tral event of faith (for Christianity the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ), claiming to merely echo that event, while also its complex task has
been to codify the truth of that event into some sort of universal doctrine.
The Creeds perform this function of theological determination brilliantly
as a perfect instance of learned ignorance.14 The Creeds respond to the his-
torical heresies, and one may generalize about heresy by claiming that, in
contradistinction to orthodoxy, they always say too much, either making
a claim to learned knowing or to radical gnosis (Laruelle himself discerns
this very difference between his unlearned knowledge and the principle
of sufficient heresy).15 At the same time, the Creeds go on to say quite a
bit, all of it very learned, which is to say, with Laruelle, all very Greek and
sometimes, though very rarely and in a qualified way, Jewish, but all of
it quite ignorant of the radical immanence of Man. Echo and control is
learned ignorance.
Non-Philosophy appears to mimic theology in its thinking from the
Real and not of it. On the one hand, Laruelle has already noticed this
and tried to differentiate non-philosophy from theology, specifically in its
negative mode, by highlighting two important differences. First, the “non”
of non-philosophy is not a negation, but is actually a positive operation
within thought from the Real. When the (non-)One or “clone” of the Real,
which is the form of philosophical immanence at play for non-philosophical
thought, takes on the “non” it is always as a kind of superstructure to the
infrastructure. It models the Real in practice, not representation. Thus,
the “non” is not about ineffable statements such as “the One is Being
beyond Being,” but of positive practices within thought. Second, Laruelle
claims, the (non-)One is an irreversible static effect of the Real, it is a dyad
unilateralized from the perspective of the Real. The implication is that
other negative forms of theological thought posit a negation that is taken
to actually affect the Real itself, even if this goes under different names
(Hegel and Hegelian forms of theology). The question of language is cru-
cial here. While in negative theology language is always taken to be insuf-
ficient to describe God, within non-philosophy language is contingent on
the One and can then still provide the means for an adequate description
and in fact this contingency requires that it be described, but only in the
last-instance.16
This differentiation, however, does not say enough yet. Theology is
not reducible to negative theology, and the more sophisticated forms of
negative theology are always combined with a positive project. There is
a similarity between non-philosophy and theology that goes down to the
level of axiomatic practice. To see this simply replace the Real with the
name of God. Theology thinks from God and not of God (in the same
way that philosophy would think of God). Theology cannot think of God
without first thinking from God and in this way theology is an axiomatic
practice like non-philosophy. Yet it is this very axiomatic aspect of the-
ology’s practice that underlies its principle of sufficient theology where
everything is theologizable because theology’s nonobject, God, is related
or even meta-related to everything that is. In non-philosophy’s method-
ological cloning of theology, how does it avoid its own self-sufficiency?
The principle of sufficient theology is clearly in a different register than
philosophy’s self-sufficiency principle in that it does not claim to have
a privileged place in the thinking of everything self-sufficiently, but as
auto-donation or auto-givenness of Divine sufficiency from its own notion
of God that functions, with various differences, in a structurally similar
way to the Real of non-philosophy. Laruelle suggests in Future Christ that
it is the figure of the heretic that must be taken up and that the Gnostic
Christ is a model of heresy. Yet, the historical Christ reportedly wanted to
draw all things unto himself, and, as we have seen, Laruelle locates this
universal salvation as one of the sources of his appellation “Future Christ.”
Can one still have this sort of theological universal, even as cloned in non-
religion, and avoid theology’s principle of sufficient theology? If so, then
non-philosophy needs to be unified with the practice of non-theology in
order to overcome the temptation to this principle.
This practice operates along two axioms: (1) the Real is foreclosed to
authority and tradition and (2) what is true(-without-truth) in theology
is what is most generic and thus what is most secular. The operations
of these axioms are largely already at work in the practice of Laruelle’s

non-philosophy, but they have not been developed in relation to theol-
ogy proper nor in relation to non-philosophy’s own practice within a
non-philosophical community that exists outside of the specific work of
Laruelle. This will be the focus of this chapter’s conclusion before we turn
to the development of an immanental ecology in part III.
The Real Foreclosed to Authority and Tradition
The question of authority is at play throughout Laruelle’s work, but its most
mature formulation with regard to Christianity, or “the-Christianity” in
the parlance of non-philosophy, a unitary form of thought that consid-
ers itself sufficient, is found in his Future Christ. Here Laruelle takes
up a common trope in his theory, that of the privileging of minori-
ties, of the individual Man-in-person, over that of authorities, or the
World. The World is, in non-philosophy, a name for the confusion of
some form of thought with the Real (hence we saw that in Philosophie
non-standard Laruelle calls philosophy a thought-World). During the first
phases of his career, Laruelle is concerned primarily with philosophy and
thus World often refers to the confusion of philosophy with the Real.
“Worldly thought” means “auto-sufficient thought,” thought taking itself
as distinct from the Real, and thus thought that has fallen into halluci-
natory error. Mullarkey aptly sums up the World when he writes that
“all philosophical thought is really about itself, it is auto-sufficient. Its
so-called world—x—is actually a mirror of itself.”17 With regard to theo-
logical forms of thought this reflective form is complicated insofar as the
reflection is always double. This double character of theological reflec-
tion relies on its tradition. Standard theology, called thus to make room
for a non-standard, heretical, or non-theology, claims to be dependent
upon a tradition. It looks to the tradition for its content, which it echoes
in its own voice. But this tradition is itself ungrounded, is itself but an
occasion, and in reality the tradition and authority are structured as an
amphibology since the tradition is but the discourse of authority and
authority derives its power from this discourse. It is another form of the
World, of a claim to self-sufficiency, of orthodoxy, which all new forms
of thought must be plunged into. This is common to all forms of Worldly
thought, where the individual, where radical immanence, is plunged into
some other aspect of the World, never known in itself, but always medi-
ated through the structure of the World, which is to say by way of the
Authorities.18
In Future Christ Laruelle thinks from the perspective of the murdered

Gnostics of history as a particular form of universally persecuted heresy.
This is not a denial of the horrors of the Jewish Shoah and it is not in any
way a justification for the many crimes committed against humanity by
itself. Rather, it reveals something beneath the particularity of the name
“Jew” or “Tutsi” or “Shi’a.” It reveals that an individual human is murdered
as a human. That the human endures crime. Laruelle puts it this way:
The heretics reveal to us that man is in an ultimate way that being, the
only one, who endures crime and is characterized by the possibility of
being murdered rather than simply persecuted and taken hostage, exter-
minated as “man” rather than as “Jew.” Why ultimate? Because man is
without-consistency, he is on principle, in contrast to other beings, able to be
murdered, he is even the Murdered as ﬁrst term for heretical thought and for
the struggle that it performs.19
I should note here, though without developing it further until the final
chapter, that I do not hold to Laruelle’s anthropocentric characterization
of man as such and consider it a form of philosophical determination of the
Earth that has remained within his theory. This is hardly a reason to give
up on non-philosophy, though, since it calls for a kind of “permanent her-
esy,” a constant pragmatic return to its own theory to deepen its practice.
So, from the perspective of ecology there must be some room for a “crime
against the biosphere” perpetuated, as the crime against humanity is, by
some aspect of the biosphere against itself. But, this focus on the minority
status or radical individual identity, precisely because it is without-Essence,
of the human distinct from the forms of unitary identity that are bestowed
upon human beings by the World discloses the radically foreclosed nature
of the Real to authority and tradition. Instead, the Real-One is always
a challenge to authority, always an “outside-memory” that is lost to the
Western form of memory, but that is at the same time not lost because it
is the essence of thought’s non-consistency as always insufficient to think
the Real.20
Thus, heresy is the privileged form of non-theological thinking, because
it is in its immanence always inconsistent, always the shared inconsistency
that marks the identity of the human. There are, of course, majoritarian
or authoritarian forms of heresy and concerning these Laruelle remarks,
“What is more hopeless than a Principle of Sufficient Rebellion,” but these
can be differentiated from heresy as struggle.21 Laruelle delineates this dif-
ferentiation in Future Christ, tracing the differences between war, or the
Agon of philosophical absolute immanence (what we located in the previ-
ous chapter as a simulacra of immanence), and the rebellion of historical
Gnostics. In the case of war and rebellion it is always a matter of an under-

lying authoritarian logic, a “because of.” The rebellion of Gnostics against
Christian philosophy is always “a reaction of auto-protection against
aggression.”22 While the non-theological point is always to raise as primary
that which is not autoprotective, that which is an “(immanent) because,”
of that “revolt that commences and does not cease to commence in each
instant, proletariat or not, exploitation or not. But if it has in itself suf-
ficient reasons to start, it has only too many of them and cannot make
a cause of them.”23 In other words, struggle, when separated from even
rebellion as a minoritarian form of authority, is separated from the World
in general. It is a generic practice.
The Generic Secular as True-without-Truth
The structure that is shared by theology and non-philosophy differs on the

fundamental level of practice. If non-philosophy aims at a generic practice,
one that is from the One as rigorously immanent in-One, theology always
aims at a universal practice that is rooted in something transcendent to its
language. Theology, in all its monotheistic forms, and despite whatever
mixture of negative and positive statements it produces, must always sub-
sume the individual into the absolute and, furthermore, into the form of
the human proclaimed by the authority of tradition. It must do so because
it is God, the highest that can be thought, that provides the cause for the
tradition. Each tradition begins as the struggle with a particular experience
of God that becomes static and taken to be sufficient for that struggle.24
Of course, this is not how any particular religion would present itself, for
the invariant apophatic character of monotheistic religion allows theolo-
gians to claim that the tradition isn’t sufficient to circumscribe the being
of God while that tradition-structure still remains the only sufficient way
to think about God in a way that avoids idolatry. Or it may even allow
them to claim, as is the case to some extent with the Protestant theolo-
gian Karl Barth, that this tradition fosters its own dissolution, its own
form of non-religion, which is ultimately the true faithfulness to the God
witnessed to by the tradition slowly withering away in the harsh light of
revelation. The non-theological supplement to non-philosophy retains the
generic practice of non-philosophy, its general philo-fiction that encour-
ages a kind of wild hyperspeculation, and so it must be, in some sense,
“secular.” Laruelle himself affirms this writing, “Non-Philosophy affirms
a ‘secularity’ [laïcité] by principle, as universal as it or philosophy can be.
It refuses conspicuous religious adherences in thought, and even the ruse
of non-religion, which non-philosophy has the means to unmask and ana-

lyze.”25 The meaning of this secularity, which I have also called the “generic
secular” and, elsewhere, “secularity-without-secularism,” will be explored
in preparation for the final chapter and before moving on to the next.
According to the conservative Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank
“[s]ecular discourse [ . . . ] is actually constituted in its secularity by ‘heresy’
in relation to orthodox Christianity.”26 This claim is supposed to call the
secular philosopher back to the fold of the Christian tradition, where their
ideas find true fulfillment. However, this heretical aspect of modern phi-
losophy has not actually gone far enough. Every instance of representation,
where the Real-One is said to be finally thought adequately, which is in
actuality every form of authoritarian thought, calls forth heresy as the actual
human-in-person struggles with that authorities’ attempt to alienate their
actuality within a auto-positional transcendental field. Thus, there was a
particular secular, one that claimed to be universal and absolute, but was
in reality a post-Christian secular, a form of the secular that presented itself
as an authority before which human beings, particularly non-European
human beings, had to prostrate themselves. This is the form of the secu-
lar, which I will refer to as simply “secularism,” that is rightly resisted by
contemporary postsecular discourses. This resistance has not simply been
intellectual, but also political, since this imperial secularism ultimately
combined both. Talal Asad aptly sums up the nature of this secular writ-
ing: “Secularism is not simply an intellectual answer to a question about
enduring social peace and toleration. It is an enactment by which a political
medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular
and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class,
gender, and religion.”27 This form of secularism was indeed parasitic on
Christian orthodoxy, though that managed to still pit a form of Christian
identity against other forms of identity in the colonial expansion of Europe.
Secularism is thus a negative movement of thought. It aims to negate real
human beings in their identity-practices because those practices, if allowed
to proliferate, would constitute a rebellion against the dominant World or
Authority. This is not mere academic speculation here, but is happening
yet again in Europe without shame as in Merkel’s Germany where she has
proclaimed, in the light of the relationship between a minority Islamic cul-
ture and the dominant secular Germany culture, that multiculturalism has
failed and that new immigrants must adhere to Leitkultur. Or in Cameron’s
Britain moving toward more draconian immigration policy as the country
begins to reflect a “muscular liberalism.” Or in Berlusconi’s Italy (and it
remains Berlusconi’s at the level of culture) where Roma are required to
carry identity cards with them and are said to be the main threat of rap-
ing “Italy’s women.” Or in Sarkozy’s and Hollande’s France, which has
continued its assault on non-Christian traditions, culminating in the ban

on the wearing of any face covering in order to outlaw the burqa and niqab
worn by a small minority of French Muslim women. Secularism is thus a
tool of domination and formation of selves within society, and not the pure
and empty form of society it, at times, has claimed to be.
In sharp distinction to this form of the secular (secularism), which is
always a form of philosophical decision, a form of separating out what falls
within the realm of “proper” and what is “foreign,” the generic secular is
an operation of entering into any form of religious thought and practice
whatsoever in order to mutate it, to perform an operation of “generic forc-
ing” that unleashes what is most true within that thought, which is to say
most immanent, most in-person, or most generic. This notion of “generic
forcing” is described by Laruelle as “the concrete act of the generic matrix
that exceeds by their fusion or superposition (we no longer want to speak
of their “unity”) the duality of philosophical opposites, their division and
their unity.”28 That is to say, the generic secular exceeds the duality of
dominant and minority culture, of dominant and minority tradition, both
as division and unity, in order to think them both as part of a larger dyad
of the Real and thought (which is ultimately foreclosed to the Real). From
that perspective they are superpositioned (another name for the imma-
nence of a unified theory in Philosophie non-standard ), they inhabit the
same space as two. Neither of the two terms has dominance over the other,
but each in fact is now just material that can be experimented with within
the generic matrix of non-theology. Thus, what is true within any theologi-
cal system will be what is most generic, what remains working after this
superposition.
Non-Theology begins from the perspective of victims, but as
subjects-in-struggle, it is haunted by the image of violence, always a vio-
lence that outstrips its identity as religious or secular. But if it is haunted
by these images it is also productive of positive images of the generic secu-
lar. The figures in these images remain weak, minimal, in the eyes of the
authorities whose use of transcendence is always in the hopes of subjugating
man-in-person, of forcing the human to be unthought, to instead divert
thought through transcendental circuits that disempower both theory
and practice. But that weakness, that minimal character of these figures,
indeed, their very generic appearance is the manifestation of the Real itself.
If so often we are now required to call forth the image of terrorist violence,
whether that image be the so-called Islamist violence of 9/11 or the capital-
ist and neoimperialist violence of Iraq and Afghanistan, then as an image
of the generic secular I want to call to mind an image that follows one of
those violent images. On January 1, 2011, in Alexandria, Egypt, a suicide
bomber attacked those attending a Coptic church leaving 21 people dead
and nearly 90 injured. This event preceded the Coptic Orthodox Church’s
celebration of Christmas and during the Christmas Eve service, in an act of
solidarity, Egyptian Muslims surrounded the church to provide a human
shield and assure their Christian compatriots of their safety and liberty to
worship. The next image is more recent, perhaps more melancholy consid-
ering even more recent events in Egypt, and sprung radically into reality
during the recent uprising and attempts at an ongoing revolution in Egypt.
During the tense standoff with police, many of whom were corrupt and
largely loyal to former President Mubarak, many of the occupiers of Tahir
Square still wanted to carry out their religious duties and when the call
to prayer rung out from the minarets throughout Cairo they would make
their bodies vulnerable and pray. During the early days of the struggle the
police would heap abuse upon the occupiers and often attack them (there
is an especially inspiring video of an old woman shaming a police officer
for acting without any sense of piety). To protect their Muslim compatriots
during these vulnerable periods and to give them the dignity and peace
required for prayer, the Coptic Christians of Egypt formed a ring around
those at prayer repeating the act of becoming human shields.
What do these emotive images have to do with this project though?
What do they really have to do with the generic as presented here? In short,
these images are manifestations of the Real; they are manifestations of the
secular messianity of the Future Christ as laid out by Laruelle. The generic
helps us get a grip on how this messianity is made to function in a secular
way within the theoretical practice of non-theology. Both messianity and
the secular are determined in the last instance (or find their “last-identity”)
for and in non-philosophy by the generic. In Future Christ Laruelle uses the
term “minimal” instead of generic, but the function is ultimately the same as
minimal is a way of talking about the generic determination of Christianity
as material. This is what he means when he writes poetically that “[t]he
Future Christ rather signiﬁes that each man is a Christ-organon, that is to
say, of course, the Messiah, but simple and unique once each time. This is
a minimal Christianity. We the Without-religion, the Without-church, the
heretics of the future, we are, each-and-everyone, a Christ or Messiah.”29
While he is speaking specifically here of Christianity, theoretically (even
if Laruelle himself does not bear this out in his own practice) there could
be a cacophony, though simple, of minimal forms of religious material. A
minimal Judaism. A minimal Islam. Even a minimal Voodoo. Each time
placed within a generic matrix; not reduced to its “essence” but thought as
a simple and thus radical immanence. The generic functions as a matrix
within which thought develops; a generic matrix provides certain determi-
nations for thought (the matrix itself is determined not by a meta-matrix,
but by its in-One character).
Laruelle’s formulation of this generic, which characterizes this matrix,

is derived from philosophical materials. The importance of the generic
for non-philosophy has only recently come to the forefront and comes to
replace the idea of “minimal,” which is more operative in Future Christ.
Laruelle tells us in his recent works that he derives the generic from
Feuerbach-Marx-Badiou. What’s important in each of these philosophi-
cal constructions is the connection between humanity and science, a con-
nection or more accurately “idempotence” that is thought more radically
immanental in Laruelle. The importance of the generic in Feuerbach is
largely lost to us in the Anglophone world since Gattungswesen is usu-
ally translated in English as “species-being.” However, the French transla-
tion captures this as être générique. Now Marx takes up this formulation
of the generic and it is Marx, Laruelle claims, that truly initiates the
generic science-thought that thinks scientifically from the universality
of the human. Though this remains too close to Hegel, it is Marx’s pre-
supposition or axiom of human universality that allows for his freeing of
philosophy by way of a fusion with science. You have something similar
happen in Badiou, except he largely returns to the pre-Marxist notion of
Feuerbach’s generic humanity and thinks it alongside of the mathemati-
cian Paul Cohen’s concept of the generic subset (from which he takes his
concept of “forcing” that is also important in Laruelle’s recent work). This
form of the generic undergirds Badiou’s understanding of the genericity of
truth procedures. Zachery Luke Fraser has summarized the five traits of
this genericity as having an (1) an indiscernible, unpredictable, and aleatory
character; (2) infinitude; (3) excrescence relative to the situation; (4) a situ-
atedness; and (5) universality.30
Laruelle would affirm each of these, though with certain qualifications
and with pain taken to secure these notions from simply falling back into
their philosophical overdeterminations. For example, infinitude in Cohen
refers to a possibility not “actual infinity” so to speak, and thus the uni-
versality operative for the generic is actually thought closer to Marx than
Cohen-Badiou, for the universality of non-philosophy’s genericity can’t
operate in the usual philosophical way where a universal is posited on the
basis of its “to-come” status in the middle of a nonuniversal space. Marx
himself doesn’t truly avoid this with his conception of the proletariat,
but he does locate in the notion of struggle something that is futural, but
future as immanence of the human-in-person. The universality of struggle
is the determination-in-the-last-identity of the human, the identity that is
immanental and which other identities exist as subject to. This sense of
struggle that is generic is what exceeds the specific and the individual (this
is what “forcing” does in mathematics) and transforms the transcendental
into simple material.
From the Generic Quantum to Generic Ecology

Laruelle’s latest project marks his most complete form of non-philosophy to
date. His abiding interest was always in bringing together science and phi-
losophy into a unified theory and through his experimentations with par-
ticular religious materials, creating various unified theories of Gnosticism
and Christianity, he found a model for bringing philosophy into dialogue
with a specific form of science. Philosophie non-standard marks Laruelle’s
most ambitious project, the one that aims for a true philo-fiction where
a human being is unafraid of putting forth a theory that respects none
of the boundaries said to exist by any form of authority, scientific, reli-
gious, or philosophical. Over these three chapters I have tried to show
the development of non-philosophy from its first discovery of philosophy’s
self-sufficiency and its first attempts to escape from the trap of that narcis-
sistic reflection and all the way through to its present mature formulation.
It is the philo-fiction of a Real foreclosed to thought, a Real before which
all forms of thought are equal in this foreclosure, and which provides
the general axioms that allow for an interaction with ecology that moves
beyond the stale practice of either superimposing an ethical formulation
on scientific practice or of wildly speculating on the underlying ontological
and metaphysical meaning of nature separate from the earthly concerns of
ethics.
Non-Philosophy provides both a critique of the usual philosophically
imposed division of labor between itself and the sciences, and a model of
thought that engages with a particular science to create new ideas. Laruelle
favors quantum physics without falling into the temptation of subsum-
ing this scientific practice into preexisting philosophical models such as
materialism or spiritualism. The science is allowed to truly mutate the phi-
losophy and the philosophy to mutate the science until they become a form
of unified theory. In parts III and IV of this book I will do the same, but
with a different science, with different particular material, that of ecology,
combined with both philosophy and theology. This will take the form of a
“generic ecology” or “immanental ecology,” which makes generic six con-
cepts derived from scientific ecology. These concepts will be the focus of
part III, which will then be put to use in part IV in a theory of nature from
the perspective of a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology.
Part III
Immanental Ecology and

Ecologies (of) Thought
Chapter 8
Real Ecosystems (of) Thought
Ecosystems (of) thought are real. As such ideas can be explored using the
concepts operative in scientific ecology. Rather than treating the works
of philosophers and theologians as if they were words from an oracle, one
treats them as if their thought were an ecosystem. Among philosophical
work there are populations that interact with one another (to name two
dominant populations (of) thought, Being and Alterity) in a way that
either creates a healthy ecosystem (of) thought, called biodiversity in ecol-
ogy, or where a dominant species degrades the health of the ecosystem by
spreading and destroying the niches allowed other populations. Laruelle’s
non-philosophy claims that philosophy always creates a united dualism, or
a dualism that is ultimately united in the form of a philosophical decision,
but a philosophical work demands more than this simply unilateral duality
in order to operate. There are other populations (of) thought that both sup-
port this dualism of dominant species and that populate the philosophical
field as the dualism itself has needs that allow for the formation of niches
within the ecosystem (of) thought. Thus there is no account in Heidegger
of Being without a whole host of other populations (of) thought that in
turn affect that account within the unified ecosystem (of) thought. Or, to
use another example, there is no thought of God in Aquinas without other
populations (of) thought such as causality and Roman Catholic Church
doctrine. How though do these populations interact with one another and
what population can be removed from an ecosystem (of) thought while
retaining its particular vitality when proposed in a different ecosystem (of)
thought?
Every philosophy is built upon some never-living element that in
ecology forms the inorganic spatial and temporal element of the ecosys-
tem. Often philosophy, especially philosophy of nature, focuses on this
never-living element confusing it with transcendence or some transcendent

element of things in the world. One thinks of the place accorded to logic or
time in philosophical investigations where these aspects tend to be seen as
dominant over and above the unified aspect of its interactions with the liv-
ing and the dead. However, an immanental ecology allows us to see these
elements as what they are—elements within a wider immanent system of
thought. System here speaks only to the identity of this immanence, rather
than its determination. Now of course these elements are necessary for the
entire working of the system itself, but their overall shape also comes to be
changed by the overall working of the system. There is no dominant rela-
tionship here, but only a unified working of the system as such. This is true
also of philosophy and can be shown if we consider Deleuze’s conception
of immanence. On the surface Deleuze’s pure immanence appears to be a
variant of Anglo-American naturalism, or the idea that all transcendental
and eternal ideas of reality should be rejected in favor of taking things as
merely given and valueless. However, this is in itself a kind of transcendent
idea concerning value. Deleuze’s attempt to create a philosophy of imma-
nence locates this issue, albeit not completely, and shows that immanence
is never merely given but is produced or in Laruelle’s terminology “lived.”1
These sorts of never-living aspects must change their spatial and temporal
configurations in response to the energy exchange of the living and the
dead that plays out across them and in response to collisions with other
never-living elements and vice versa. Whatever is taken as transcendent
and a condition of thought in a philosophical ecosystem (of) thought is
always changed in the unified working of the ecosystem itself. A difficulty
remaining for an immanental ecology is separating the populations that
inhabit this never-living space and time and the never-living element of
the populations. The way being appears in different philosophies will dif-
fer, being in one a population and in other an instance of the never-living.
Teasing out this difference will vary from philosophy to philosophy and
will depend upon the way the elements of each ecosystem (of) thought
are discovered through an immanental ecology rather than some illusory
transcendental essence of the never-living.
After the work of Deleuze and Guattari many will already accept
that every philosophy also generates its own form of energy flow. What
an immanental ecology does is begin to think about those energy flows
more intentionally in philosophy by locating them between living thoughts
and those that die on the page of philosophical treatises. Simply stated no
philosopher’s thoughts live on the page. Rather these dead thoughts are
reserves of energy that can be consumed and thereby exchanged with liv-
ing thoughts. The ecological definition of energy, following the definition
given it by thermodynamics, is “the ability to do work,” and a dead thought
Real Ecosystems (of) Thought 115
is by its very disembodied existence unable to do work.2 Work can only be

done when the energy present in the dead thought is realized in some new
thought. In this way a particular population (of) thought may perpetuate
itself, so that when Thomists or Hegelians produce work on Aquinas or
Hegel they are perpetuating certain ecosystems (of) thought, but a different
population (of) thought, one even antagonistic, can also feed upon the dead
thought and produce work from it that is creative within a different and
possibly new ecosystem (of) thought outside of a Thomist or Hegelian eco-
system. An immanental ecology, taking these aspects of flows as given, can
begin to think about the energy exchange in a constructive manner. What
dead elements of past philosophies are the most productive for new and
necessary ecosystems within a unified theory of philosophy and ecology?
Finally, we must begin to think about the resilience of philosophical
ecosystems (of) thought. Walker and Salt give a very simple definition
of resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still
retain its basic function and structure.”3 Why is it that by the standards
of radical philosophy and within small time-scales the worst philosophies
are the most resilient? The philosophies, like individualism, that undergird
so many of the destructive ideologies of our age seem within the wider
culture to be the most resilient to disturbance. This realization is in itself a
disturbance to the radical philosopher, yet the plurality of ecosystems (of)
thought from Thomism to Heideggarianism that themselves retain their
basic function and shared structure as minor ecosystems within the wider
ideological field must also demand our attention as well as the possibility
that populations (of) thought from ecosystems like individualism may also
disrupt these minor ecosystems. By understanding what makes a philoso-
phy resilient we can begin to understand how to create a resilient unified
theory of philosophy and ecology to respond to the shared problems of
ecology and philosophy that are the shared problems of humanity and the
nonhuman in the biosphere.
In the preceding chapters I have sketched out by way of a typology
the standard relationship between philosophy/theology and ecology. I
then turned to François Laruelle’s non-philosophy in order to sketch out
a non-standard practice of philosophy that works by thinking from radi-
cal immanence. Laruelle’s method is important for this project because it
envisions a different way of thinking philosophy and science, one that cre-
ates a democracy (of) thought where all forms of thinking are equivalent
with regard to the Real-One, which has absolute autonomy from thought
as such. In this chapter I will begin the process of constructing the unified
theory of philosophical theology and ecology called for in the first chapter
and that follows in the wake of Laruelle’s practice of non-philosophy out-
lined in the second chapter.
The ecology outlined here will be thought through the generic matrix of
non-philosophy. In order to avoid ecologism, a kind of positivism of ecol-
ogy, scientific ecology must be taken as immanental, a word I have been
using in the work and that I think is immediately understandable, but I
will explain it in more detail now. In his earlier work Laruelle describes the
“transcendental” as “rigorously immanent.”4 In Philosophie non-standard
Laruelle sees fit to simply coin a new term, “immanental,” which describes
the “non-relation” between immanence as such and experience.5 It is then
a posture of thought, like the transcendental, but one that happens within
(hence the nonrelation) the experience and immanence itself. My earliest
description of this project began by calling it a “transcendental ecology”
analogous to Gilles Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” or Laruelle’s
early description of non-philosophy as “transcendental realism” and “tran-
scendental axiomatics.”6 The point of this name was always to refer to an
idea of ecology expanded beyond its local practice and applied to philo-
sophical theology, rather than subsuming it within philosophical theology.
When the term “immanental ecology” is used, it should be kept in mind
that it still shares certain likenesses with these “transcendental” positions,
but the term “immanental” is more precise despite being a neologism
because it already refers to the posture ecology as science takes toward the
Real-One and its status as Stranger to philosophy, rather than Other or the
Same. Thus it remains relatively transcendent (to philosophical theology),
but rigorously immanent to the Real.
The point of the construction of a unified theory of philosophical the-
ology and ecology by way of this immanental ecology is not an ecolo-
gism, which would give a veneer of objectivity and scientific rigor to some
new philosophical conception of nature in exactly the way philosophy has
always exploited science as discussed in the previous chapter, but is rather
to practice a kind of “under-determination” of philosophical theology that
frees it to think nature as a first name of the Real. It does not aim to give
science a concept it requires or to force philosophical theology to recog-
nize that it is not as respectable as science. The aim is to create a way
of thinking about an abstract concept, nature, in the light of a unified
theory abstracted from both the particularities of science and philosophi-
cal theology. So, with this in mind, chapter 9 outlines six fundamental
conceptual elements of scientific ecology that bear on philosophical and
theological thought: Populations, or the diversity of species that populate
the ecosystem (biodiversity); ecological niches, which both allow for the
stability of ecosystems as well as the possibility of change; the external
energy relations of exchange that arise out of the populations interaction
with one another and is originally provided by the sun; the never-living
space and temporality of the environment; and, finally, the ecological
understanding of resilience of populations and ultimately the particular

ecosystem itself. Each concept is derived from the underlying fundamental
concept of ecology, the ecosystem, which I understand to be a description
of immanence.
Before turning to this immanental ecology we must first address in this
chapter a potential criticism from non-philosophy itself regarding ecology.
Laruelle is clear in his work that not every scientific practice frees con-
ceptual thought and, though he has not addressed ecology at length, he
does offer some critical remarks regarding it that suggest ecology remains
“too philosophical” in itself. After addressing the suitability of ecology
in general and the explication of the six main principles and concepts of
immanental ecology, which form the bulk of part III, I will then consider
in chapter 10 two thinkers whose work is closest to the project outlined
here—Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton. Both Latour and Morton
mark attempts to reconcile philosophical thought with a deep engagement
with ecology (in Latour’s case this is political ecology and in Morton’s case
it is a more unified understanding of ecology as “the ecological thought”).
In both cases it is suggested that we must rid ourselves of the concept of
nature. Not just the standard philosophical conception, but we must really
be done with nature for the sake of an ecological philosophy. As our project
aims to free philosophical theology by way of an immanental ecology to
recast nature non-philosophically, this is an obvious challenge.
Laruelle on Ecology
Rocco Gangle deftly captures the power of Laruelle’s non-philosophy when

he writes, “François Laruelle’s non-philosophy marks a bold attempt to
think the One, or Real outside of any correlation with Being and without
reference to transcendence. It is an arduous and painstaking theoretical
enterprise that must skirt the twin dangers of positivism on the hand and
false transcendentalism on the other.”7 In other words, Laruelle must navi-
gate both scientism, or the erstwhile philosophical projection of science,
and philosophy that takes itself as the guardian of thought—philosophy
that takes itself as that which provides thought for science. As I have
already discussed at length in the preceding chapter this leads Laruelle to
practice various “unified theories” where philosophy is introduced to vari-
ous other practices of thought. The goal in these dual introductions is not
to overdetermine the unphilosophical material (science, religion, etc.) with
philosophy, but to challenge philosophy through the introduction and to
treat both as simple material for thought.
The relationship with science is somewhat different though as sci-

ence is both treated as material and is materially a posture that thought
takes. The second aspect is the immanental aspect of science, insofar
as it thinks from the Real rather than attempting to circumscribe and
affect the Real, again discussed at length in the previous chapter. The
first part, however, has special bearing here as it deals with the particular
ideas and concepts operative in particular sciences and their relationship
to non-philosophy. The goal of non-philosophy’s thinking of the Real is
always to free thought from the boundaries placed on it by specular forms
of thought by, perhaps counterintuitively, locating the radical autonomy
of the Real from thought (discussed in the last chapter as unilateral
duality). With this in mind alongside the understanding of the generic
identity of science as posture, we can see that not every science provides
particular and specific forms of thought for freeing a non-standard phi-
losophy, a wild thought (which is artificial as it is natural). Laruelle him-
self asks the question, “But is every science able to be utilized for this
ultra-critical liberation of philosophy?” and answers, with obvious refer-
ence to Badiou, “Not every science is liberating for conceptual thought,
for example set-theoretical mathematics seems to be by nature rather
authoritarian, closed, and reinforces the sufficiency of philosophy, which
then dreams of fiction only at its margins, a little bit like Plato.”8 The
reference here to fiction is, again, a reference to the freeing of thought as
practice in a philo-fiction, but what is important, again, is that Laruelle
is able to recognize the need for an organon of selection with regard to
scientific material.
In Laruelle’s Philosophie non-standard the material that Laruelle thinks
with philosophy as a conceptual idempotence, where two separate thoughts
like waves come together to form a genuinely new wave that is not a syn-
thesis of the two waves but is produced by them, is quantum mechanics.
According to Laruelle quantum mechanics provides a true liberation for
conceptual thought because, while remaining in the scientific posture that
has a privileged relationship to the Real, it also “[w]eakens and disempow-
ers philosophical sufficiency in order to free its power of invention [ pouvoir
d’ invention].”9 One of the reasons that Laruelle is critical of Badiou’s use of
set-theory is because it replaces the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy with
a Principle of Sufficient Mathematics. Instead of freeing thought, Badiou
casts a metaphilosophy where philosophy may not be able to produce
truths, but it alone thinks them across the multiple terrains of knowledge.
Or, while Badiou argues that we must not suture philosophy to any particu-
lar truth-procedure, he nevertheless sutures Being to mathematics as reveal-
ing the Real of Being and thereby sutures the Real yet again to Being. The
generic science that non-standard philosophy aims to be requires scientific
material that underdetermines philosophy, again in the manner already

discussed.
So does scientific ecology meet this test or is it already too philosophi-
cal? Does it have its own Principle of Sufficient Eco-logic? It would seem
that political ecology does provide this authoritarian, closed, reinforcing of
a kind of philosophical sufficiency. Oftentimes in popular discourse this
is the role that political ecology takes in the minds of some self-styled eco-
logical philosophers and theologians, similar to Latour’s understanding of
capital “S” Science that is mistakenly taken to provide the objective end
to deliberation. The French ecologist Christian Lévêque points to the dif-
ficult relationship between political ecology and scientific ecology writing,
“[T]here is in theory no tight division between scientific ecology and activ-
ist ecology. But there is an obvious risk of confusing the philosophical
reflection with the ecological science itself.”10 When reading the various
histories of ecology, both scientific and general or political, it becomes clear
that many thinkers often fall prey to this risk and so often ecological scien-
tists can fall prey to a kind of “science of management” that obscures its true
scientific character as a science of knowledge.11 It is this element of political
ecology that Žižek, despite his underlying ignorance of scientific ecology,
rightly challenged in his popular polemic of 2008 where he wrote:
This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant
form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing
the declining religion: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function,
that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits.
The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not
Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in
a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of
natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our
Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should
not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a
power we should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery
over our bio-sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb
its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is
why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radi-
cally our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust
of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the
unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe.12
I suspect that Laruelle too is distrustful of political ecology, though the few
places he does mention ecology his true evaluation remains ambiguous. I
was able a pose a question to him that brought up ecology and to which he
did respond directly in Rome as he gave one of the keynote lectures at the
Grandeur of Reason conference in 2008. My question dealt with what I

took at that time to be the underlying humanism of non-philosophy and I
asked if ecology does not challenge the centrality of the human for think-
ing. His response, while not differentiating between scientific and political
ecology, as it was a verbal back and forth, suggested that he saw ecology as
performing a similar debasement of humanity paralleled in philosophy’s
obsession with thinking beyond the human. So, in a project that bases
itself on the thought developed by Laruelle, what argument can I give that
scientific ecology does provide not only the posture but also certain useful
material that underdetermines philosophy and thus liberates it conceptu-
ally to think nature?
While part of the underlying background of part III will be to respond
to this question in detail and show the importance of thinking with sci-
entific ecology, I can still provide here a general argument before mov-
ing on to discuss the challenge to philosophy that comes by introducing
it to scientific ecology. To do so I will first consider the only two sus-
tained discussions of ecology I know of in Laruelle’s work. The first
comes to us not as one of his published pieces but as one of the occa-
sional “Non-Philosophical Letters” that he has posted on the website for
the Organization Non-Philosophique Internationale entitled “L’impossible
fondation d’une écologie de l’océan.” The letter, published on May 7, 2008,
performs a thought experiment taking the common metaphor of philoso-
phy as a dangerous sea and the philosopher as he who navigates that sea or
the fisherman who fishes from it (found in Leibniz, Kant, and Nietzsche
most famously) as its starting point. There is of course an obvious problem
with this metaphor for the non-philosopher since the philosopher takes
himself to be above the dangerous ocean, suggesting that there is a kind of
foundation for an ecology separated from that ocean itself. In contradis-
tinction the non-philosopher takes herself to be the boat: “Her posture (if
we can put it this way) is that of a boat, and so her being-in-the-water can
no longer be a being-in-the-world.”13 This will bear on his final remarks on
the impossibility of the philosophical foundation in a rigorously immanent
ecology of the ocean, but there is a less obvious problem and one that con-
nects directly to his idempotence of philosophy and quantum mechanics
in Philosophie non-standard.
Philosophy, Laruelle says, thinks in the posture of an element. It privi-
leges thinking then from the dirt (called earth usually) or sometimes as
fire, and this is reflected in its “corpuscular” posture tied to old forms
of physics. Non-standard philosophy thinks according to the undulatory
character of the waves and so the sea (rather than simply water) becomes
an interesting metaphor-element to think from, though it should be noted
that soil has a certain “wave like” quality as well. Instead of being tied
to a corpuscular earth, secure in our foundations, or burning ourselves

up in a divine fire, the non-philosopher sets out with wild abandon on
the sea. This wild abandon renounces any claim to foundation, to the
idea that the philosopher owns some bit of the earth, but instead that
they are in-the-water without property rights, without ideational secu-
rity: “It is against ‘foundation’ and other similar notions as transcendent
idols against which we oppose the immanence of energy or the energy of
immanence.”14
This then is where Laruelle’s seeming distrust of ecology stems from.
Does it as a science engage in the same kind of philosophical idol-making
as those philosophers who tie themselves to a secure foundation? Laruelle
ends the article by calling for a “human ecology,” a remark that might
seem to parallel Pope Benedict XVI’s call to focus on human ecology after
which the environment will benefit. This, however, is not the meaning
behind Laruelle’s use of the phrase “human ecology.” Rather it speaks to a
more rigorously immanent understanding of ecology that is called forth,
but not developed, by Laruelle. To understand this better consider the
final remarks of the essay. Laruelle first begins with his survey of the “situ-
ation of ecology”: “Ecology’s situation is as always theoretically divided
between philosophies that metaphorize physis, theologize it as a transcen-
dent entity of ‘Nature’ [lanature], and the physico-chemical sciences, free
in themselves, which inevitably break it up. Between all of them there are
the juridico-political ideologies of the ‘ecologists.’”15 While Laruelle does
not demonstrate a particularly strong understanding of the specifics of
scientific ecology, this does suggest that he nevertheless accurately under-
stands how ecology functions in philosophy, theology, and as distributed
among a number of other scientific disciplines.
Laruelle suggests that a more unified form of ecology could be brought
about by way of non-philosophy’s “last instance”:
A human ecology in-the-last-instance will be theoretically more rigorous.

As the man of the Last Instance is never a foundation, he must renounce or
give up every “earthly” or “land-owning” foundation of an ecology of the
ocean and start thinking the sea not as such but from itself, according to the
sea which is also human in the way which the human is every Last Instance.16
The meaning of “human ecology” then refers to the particular immanence

of man (as species-being) that non-philosophy has tried to think from its
inception, rather than measuring the worth of things according to a tran-
scendent notion of Man (what Laruelle would call the-Man): “Man can
finally see his fixed and moving image, his intimate openness as the great-
est secret in the ocean. ‘Free men always cherish the sea . . . ’”17
As I will make clearer in the next section, the purpose of engaging with
scientific ecology is not simply to accept its concepts and ideas as if the
project was simply a kind of ecological positivism. Rather, the task is to
think infect philosophical and theological thinking on nature with certain
ecological concepts that will free philosophical theology to think nature
and free our thinking from its Greek overdetermination as physis and from
its monotheistic theological determination as transcendent Other or as the
simple conceptual inverse of God (this will be discussed at length in the
following chapter). But not because ecology thinks nature better than phi-
losophy, the thinking of nature still largely belongs to the province of a
philosophical theology while, as Lévêque says, “ecology can no longer be a
reflection of nature.”18 Rather philosophico-theological thinking will itself
“go under” an immanental ecology of thought, which, in turning away
from thinking moored to a transcendent notion of the-Earth, will free it
to think nature in a nonreductive and nonspecular way. As Laruelle writes,
“Nature is given an other-than-reductive meaning in this impossible onto-
logical foundation and/or that physical powerlessness in this giving does
not have definitive limitations but inhuman misunderstandings or disori-
ented interpretations.”19 We can change the way we understand nature
philosophically and theologically by thinking from the foundation-less
posture of a scientific posture.
Laruelle has affirmed much of this in a recent lecture delivered in late
2012 in both London and New York entitled “The Degrowth of Philosophy:
Toward a Generic Ecology.” There we see him implicitly affirming many
of the ideas presented in this work, formost among them the notion that
philosophy and other forms of knowledge can be treated ecologically. Of
course, he states this in a slightly more polemical manner writing, “It is
not a question of a ‘philosophy of degrowth,’ such as we sometimes hear
of today, but of the degrowth of philosophy itself.”20 In this essay Laruelle
goes on to try and think ecology in the “quantum spirit.” This is clearly
not from the perspective of scientific ecology the challenge we are putting
forth for theology and philosophy, but as a kind of political ecology still,
and yet this quantum notion is not far from the spirit of actual scientific
ecology as I present it here. Laruelle writes,
The quantum model obliges me to maintain the correlate of physics (phys-

ics as essential quantum, not the traditional physis) is the universe, and not
the world. I understand by “universe” the correlate of modern knowledge,
by “world” the correlate of philosophy. I would add that the universe is not
the great mystical All evoked by certain physicists, but an epistemologi-
cal correlate of physico-mathematical knowledge. The universe, even as an
object of experimentation and above all if it is an object of experimentaiton,
is an object of knowledge, not a material object.21
This notion of a universe that is not the great mystical All maps neatly
onto the notion of nature presented here. For nature will turn out not to be
a physical object, not an All (this is the hallucinatory theological form of
Nature explored later), but remains where the relations of the ecologies (of)
thought play out. Laruelle also seems to be thinking something similar
when he writes, “Let’s suppose an ecology of the relations of thought, of its
highest forms of which we can make use—science and philosophy, art and
religion, relations with and within the universe.”22
Yet the lingering problem of the temptation to humanism remains in
this essay as well. Laruelle notes that “[t]o preserve the natural environ-
ment of existence, to preserve man and his survival qua species even, is
the immediate and primary aim of ordinary ecology.”23 But this goal, for
Laruelle, must submit to a more primary defense of human beings, “The
‘defence’ and the maintenance of human environments, spontaneous and
naturalist ecology, must be reordered in view of a defence of generic man
in (and sometimes against) the environment or milieu of knowledges.”24
Laruelle is not committing himself to a human chauvinism here, however,
as he does go on to write, “This new objective of ecology cannot be called
superior or meta-ecological. It is in-the-last-instance a generic usage or
epistemic milieus, the best appropriation of knowledges (including philos-
ophy itself) in view of the defence of humans against their self-destructive
drive, which has its origin in the world.”25 In other words, the problem of
human environments and even going against the environment is the same
problem that haunts this work—that nature has become a problem for
nature. Though Laruelle in some sense clearly is walking a thin line, one
that he may not successfully traverse in future works on the relationship of
the animal and the human, it is a line drawn by political ecology itself. For
all of our green consciousness
is still to presuppose that man can decide freely, in some all-powerful man-
ner, to safeguard nature or to destroy it. Whereas he does not really have this
power to transform it wholesale, since he himself belongs to every decision,
is included in it and perturbs it, puts it back into play with every decision or
repetition. He has only the power to underdetermine his decisions.26
So let us go under ecology in order to confront ourselves along with nature,

to make the decision if we want to go on living or not, to live as natural
creatures against the hallucinatory Nature we have projected.
Chapter 9
Elements of an Immanental Ecology
In this chapter I will describe six fundamental conceptual elements of sci-

entific 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 “abso-
lute” 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 idempo-
tence, 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 experi-
ment 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. Again, rather than a simple naturalism
that ecology or other forms of science would undergird, here we begin
with the idea that nature is manifest in ecosystems, such that ecology does
think it in some relative way, but nature as such is not the object of ecology.
Nature, as perverse, is only the object of a unified theory of philosophical
theology and ecology. This doesn’t exclude other unified theories, though
ecology is especially useful in this instance because it is a synthetic science
bringing together the sciences of biology, physics, biochemistry, geology,
climatology, and many others in its study of the ecosystem. In its own
openness to disciplinary perversion it is able to express in its principles and
concepts nature’s perversion.
An obvious retort to this thought experiment is that this is simply a
metaphor and reveals nothing interesting in itself. Of course the Greek
metaphora literally means “a transfer” and comes from the verb meta-
pherein meaning “to transfer, carrying over.” The charge is that this “just
a metaphor” suggests we are unduly “transferring” an idea from scientific
ecology to philosophy. In short that we are not respecting the proper bor-
ders that allow the standard division of thought to work. This is also an
economic division of thought, one relating in part to labor (so who does
what jobs) and in part to branding. Of course there is a reasonable warning
in here as well, suggesting that we should not disrespect the specificity of
practices within thought. This need not be a “Sokalism,” but can point to
the real difficulties present in both scientific thinking and philosophical/
theological thinking. Consider the outrage among theologians and schol-
ars of religion when those trained in biology or cosmology publish their
largely unlearned thoughts on religion; surely then the converse would be
true as well.
So, just as Spinoza wore a signet ring with a red rose and the Latin
caute [caution] that he used to mark his texts with, we note that we are
proceeding cautiously into the scientific material. But we are still proceed-
ing because even if it were just a matter of a simple transfer of material
from scientific ecology to philosophy it could still then be following the
principles of ecology at the level of fiction. Thus one cannot see it as a
metaphor if by that one means something “outside but like an ecosys-
tem,” for the metaphor too depends on the ecosystem for its existence since
thought is tied to actuality and actuality is ecological. One may name this
the materialist element of immanental ecology, but only if what the mate-
rial is remains open to revision. However, I want to suggest that while this
is certainly a work of “philo-fiction,” there is also a more substantial basis
for positing an ecology of thought. Consider again Morton’s remark that
thinking is one of the things damaged by modern society in addition to
actual ecosystems.2 The environment inhabited by human beings, which
to say whatever particular ecosystem different human societies have code-
veloped in, is part of development of ideas. This idea was already present
in the first attempt at universal history by Ibn Khaldûn, and contemporary
environmental historians have shown that ideas are part of ecosystems.3
But this is obvious already in everyday popular environmental discourse
on the destructive nature of certain human ideas. If these ideas are allowed
to continue they will run up against ecological limits like any other species.
So, for instance, the idea of wilderness is currently on the decline because it
Elements of an Immanental Ecology 127
leads to practices that weakened ecosystems in the American West.4 Note

that this claim doesn’t need the ecological status of ideas to be dominant
in order for it to be true. So, I am not suggesting that ideas are what are
called “keynote species” that greatly determine the ecosystem. Ideas, like
most species, are “under-determined” by their ecosystem. In other words,
we can’t simply reduce ideas to their localization within an ecosystem, just
like we can’t reduce a particular plant species to its same localization, but
ecosystems nevertheless force certain ideas by way of their same imma-
nence. The ecosystem is both not the sum of its parts (so it is not reducible
to the collection of species and the exchange of energy between them) and
it is not really more than the sum of its parts either. This is why particu-
larly ecosystems are notoriously difficult to delineate in the way that exact
and abstract mathematical sciences are able to delineate their objects of
knowledge. But for more on that let us turn our attention more intention-
ally toward the ecosystem.
Ecosystem
The ecosystem concept is key to scientific ecology. Within the scientific

field there tends to be a loose division between those researchers who prac-
tice ecosystem ecology and those who practice population ecology. The
divide between these two postures can be explained in part by a sociologi-
cal cause, namely, ecologists have a strong desire to be accepted by other
biologists (for ecology was and remains a biological science) as well as other
scientists in general, who often hold up physics as the paradigm of scien-
tific work. However, due to the difficulties of studying actual, complex,
and changing systems, ecology is often not able to rise to certain epistemo-
logical norms common to more abstract sciences; for instance, falsifiability
is notoriously difficult in ecology.5 But population ecology, or the major
subfield of ecology that concerns itself with the way populations of spe-
cies are distributed in time and space and their interactions among other
populations, allows the individual ecologists to do science in a way that
is more generally accepted by the social community of scientists because
it is easier to observe and conduct experiments on discrete populations.6
The disciplinary reality, according to Lévêque, is that ecosystem ecology
and population ecology are developed in relatively autonomous manners.
Population ecology fits a generally reductionist program, while ecosystem
ecology attempts to understand “the cycles of matter and energy that struc-
ture the ecosystems” and can be said to be holistic in some sense.7 There
is, though, no real reason why a population ecologist and an ecosystem
ecologist wouldn’t work together because populations are determined by

their place in any ecosystem and ecosystems are formed in large part by
the populations that populate them. So, despite this seeming split, ecology
is at least virtually a unified scientific posture and this is especially true of
ecosystem ecology as F. Stuart Chapin III, Pamela A. Matson, and Harold
A. Mooney make clear writing, “Ecosystem ecology therefore depends on
information and principles developed in physiological, evolutionary, popu-
lation, and community ecology.”8
The ecosystem concept finds its “exact moment of birth [ . . . ] when the
English ecologist Arthur Tansley created the word and presented it in a
technical paper.”9 As I have already shown in the first chapter, this devel-
opment allowed ecology to avoid being too determined by metaphysical
systems of philosophy, namely, determinism and organicism. Yet, Tansley’s
idea, while being taken up and used in an ad hoc manner, was not taken
by most ecologists to be the grounding principle of ecology. This didn’t
happen until Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology, written in 1953
along with his brother Howard Thomas Odum, when he placed the eco-
system concept at the heart of ecological research because it is the largest
functional unit in ecology.10 Ultimately the ecological principles laid out
in this work follow the Odum interpretation of ecology and so it is neces-
sary to understand the purpose behind Odum’s placement of the ecosys-
tem concept in his book. As Golley shows in his history of the ecosystem
concept, the impetus behind Odum’s textbook came from a disagreement
between Odum and other zoologists at the University of Georgia. In late
1940s Odum pushed for the inclusion of ecology in the curriculum but the
rest of his department voted down the proposal on the basis that ecology
had no specific principles in itself. Odum responded to this with a book
clearly outlining the fundamental principles of ecology. The importance
of the ecosystem concept, laid out within the first nine pages of the book,
is summarized by the distinct ideas it leads to in ecosystem science. Golley
clearly summarizes this:
In his explanation of the ecosystem concept, Odum developed several dis-

tinct ideas. First, the largest ecosystem is the entire earth and the biosphere
is that portion of the earth where the ecosystems operate. Second, ecosys-
tems may be of various sizes, from the biosphere to the pond. Third, animals
and nongreen plants are dependent upon plants that manufacture protein,
carbohydrates, and fats through photosynthesis; plants are controlled by
animals, and both are influenced by bacteria. Forth, organisms also influ-
ence the abiotic environment. Fifth, humans have the ability to drastically
alter ecosystems. Thus, an understanding of the ecosystem concept and the
realization that mankind is part of these complex biogeochemical cycles is
fundamental to ecology and to human affairs generally. By page twelve of
his textbook Odum had laid out an agenda that anticipated the direction
taken by the ecological movement over the next twenty years.11
Golley credits Odum’s textbook with turning ecology into a recognized

science in its own right, which was recognized by the wider public as well
as the scholarly community. In part this was because in Odum’s interpre-
tation of ecology its “language and concepts reflected some of the most
advanced trends of the 1950s.”12 These advanced trends coalesced through
the twentieth century into general systems theory, from which ecology
continues to derive many tools.
It was in part Odum’s recasting of the ecosystem concept along the lines
of general system theory that recovered its importance to a new generation
of ecologists. Odum recognized the ecosystem as both a biological unit
(like an organ or organism), suggesting a determined static corpuscular
idea, and also that which is made up of the biotic community and its
environment, suggesting something more akin to a wave idea.13 For the sci-
entists this fundamental ambiguity or duality, found also in Tansley, has
been a source of distress as it continues difficulties ecologists have found
in trying to make their science more deterministic, in part to live up to the
ideals of science set by classical physics. Even though, again, classical phys-
ics doesn’t have to deal with the same level of dynamic, living complexity
of systems that ecology does. Here I hazard a thesis that will no doubt be
controversial to scientists; the fundamental duality of an ecosystem is also
its strength in thought. The duality of the ecosystem between discrete
unit and dynamic flux finds an analogue in the wave/particle duality of
matter found in quantum physics. In short, looked at from the perspec-
tive of a biological unit, the ecosystem is a unit, and from the perspective
of succession, the ecosystem is made up of the biotic community and its
environment.
In the ecologists’ attempt to describe the Real, they have been led to
think the ecosystem concept. The concept was originally formulated to
avoid philosophical and theological overdetermination (as discussed in the
first chapter), but this ultimately dual character of the ecosystem as both
discrete unit and flow point to an expression of immanence within this
conception of the ecosystem. The ecosystem concept is a post-Newtonian
concept that is determined more by an undulatory or wave-based model
than a corpuscular or particle-based one, in opposition to Laruelle’s mis-
characterization of ecology by collapsing it into standard philosophical
visions of ecology. The ocean is not the site of an impossible ecology, but
is quite simply the research-world as ecosystem where ecology thinks.
Ecology is concerned with the flow of energy between the living, the dead,
and the never-living. These are not distinct others, but are the ecosystem’s
identity in its radical immanence. Under the posture of ecology a dead

worm and a living bird = One while remaining what they are.
Adding support to this casting of ecology as expressing an undulatory
character is the special place of aquatic biology in the development of the
ecosystem concept. Prior to Tansley’s formulation of the ecosystem con-
cept Stephen Alfred Forbes posited a similar idea in 1887 that was ignored,
Golley suggests, in part because it was published in a minor regional jour-
nal with readers mostly in central Illinois, United States. Forbes studied
lakes as “microcosms” of a wider “community of interest, between predator
and prey.”14 Golley suggests that Forbes’s idea, taken up by limnologists,
advances beyond Tansley’s later and more popular conception because it
aims for the development of a functional approach requiring extensive
knowledge of what organisms live within the system and what links them
before scientist can understand their organization as a system.15 Perhaps
owing to the later influence of Forbes by way of later limnologists after the
popularization of Tansley’s idea, lakes become the site of the first advanced
ecological studies that were able to examine and express formally the flows
of energy between species and their living and nonliving environment.
Through these studies ecologists could observe the time of a particular
ecosystem, this is called succession, and consider succession as part of the
function of the biota.16
The obvious reason that lakes were so important for the development
of ecology is that a lake has relatively obvious boundaries with other sur-
rounding ecosystems. Yet, this should still not suggest a corpuscular-based
theory of ecosystems or even an organicist one, but rather simply a practical
need to find a physical body to study from which the principles of ecology
could then be developed. Ecology is decidedly an actualist science, in that
it must work with actual systems and derive all its experimental theories
from that system, and so it is perhaps more fundamentally immanentist
than a largely virtual science like quantum physics, which can engage in
more abstract and free-floating thought experiments.
I have already touched on the ways in which ecology as a science has
avoided being overdetermined by philosophy and theology. As I outlined
in the first chapter this attempt was more or less gravitated around the
concept of the ecosystem, but it would be a grave mistake to think that this
concept was given once and for all. Science does not work that way. Instead,
the concept was used axiomatically; when it worked it worked and when it
did not work the concept would be adjusted. This axiom-in-action is what
differentiates the science of ecology from the attempted theoreticism of
philosophy and theology.
This active axiomatic structure is related to the way ecology is distinct
from the other scientific practices that it draws upon and that ecology
modifies for its purposes. People often ask how ecology is different from
general systems theory, how its theory of energy differs from thermodynam-
ics, and if it is really distinct from biology in general. What is behind these
questions if not a certain kind of philosophy of science that aims to find the
science that will reveal all the required answers for a philosophy of reality.
A division of the sciences that creates a permanent war between the real sci-
ences and those sciences that depend upon them. But there is no agreement
from the philosophers on which form of science is the science and so this
war is really an internal philosophical war. What is the non-philosophical
response? A relatively peaceful one, for the way non-philosophy conceives
of the division of ideational labor locates all scientific practice and all
philosophical thought relative before the Real. Ecology is thus only dif-
ferent from those scientific practices and theories it draws upon by virtue
of its object, which is the ecosystem. The object toward which a science is
directed is immanent to the identity and posture of that science such that
the autonomy of a science is always given not by some particular practice
but by the object that produces that project. In other words, the differences
in the practices between theoretical set theory and ecology are entirely
important with regards to what can be done with the science on different
occasions, but those practices cannot be truly separated from the occasion
itself. The object brings with it the problems and practices of the science.
The problem of scientism arises when one tries to make a single science
and its object (what Laruelle calls its “research-world”) the form of thought
above all others.17 Ecology already resists this kind of overcoding of every-
thing by the very virtue of the complexity of its object. For quite simply the
ecosystem is not an abstraction that can be experimented in a laboratory,
but is a lived, immanent reality in time.
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is a relatively recent principle in scientific ecology and it isn’t

without its controversies. Lévêque, for instance, prefers the term “biological
diversity,” even while recognizing that biodiversity is simply a contraction
of this term, because of its all-too-easy appropriation by political ecology.
He points out that the term was popularized in the context of the alarm of
naturalists at the rabid decline and destruction of natural environments.18
And, as we will see in more detail later, even Edward O. Wilson, who
is one of these popularizers, raises issues regarding the fundamental unit
of biodiversity. Regardless of these issues the scientific investigation into
biodiversity is a response to the incredible diversity of life on planet Earth.
What scientists like Wilson have argued, supported by more recent work
in resilience ecology, is that this diversity is necessary for and constitutive
of the stable and resilient functioning of life on Earth. Moreover, it raises
questions of a philosophical and theological character about the concept of
nature itself. Namely, what is nature in relation to life? Is one term primary
over the other? Or are they reversible with one another? Beyond these ques-
tions the field of study around biodiversity gives us tools that can be used
to disempower philosophical and theological overdetermination of ecol-
ogy and begin to treat thought as if it were ecological (which, of course, it
always already is).
If it is true that philosophy begins in wonder (one thinks of Plato) and
theology in the fear of God seen through God’s Creation (one thinks of
Paul), then it is worth noting the reported numbers of biodiversity as sum-
marized in Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (2001), which continues to be
a standard summary of debates and issues in the study of biodiversity.
According to estimates made by Wilson in 1986 and published in 1992
the number of living species was put at 1.4 million. He goes on to state
that 13,000 “new” species are discovered each year, meaning at the time
The Diversity of Life went into its second edition in 2001 the number had
gone up to 1.5 million. Of these we have catalogued 865,000 different spe-
cies of insects and 69,000 species of fungi. These are the species we have
identified, the estimate of the true number of species on Earth ranges from
3,635,000 and 111,655,000. The vast majority of these unknown species
are ones that don’t normally occur to the human being to care about. So,
while it is estimated that we know 98 percent of the living bird species,
we know only 1.5 percent of chromophyte algal species. And as fantastic
as these numbers are, literally suggesting a planet that is teeming with liv-
ing creatures and where that very teeming provides the conditions for the
remarkable creation of more species, it is estimated that 98 percent of all
species that have existed on this planet in the more than 3.5 billion years of
biological history have disappeared into extinction forever.19
Note that these numbers refer only to species. This is the unit preferred
by those who study biodiversity because of the relative stability of species as
a concept (defined by Wilson as “a population whose members are able to
interbreed freely under natural conditions”) and the relative ease in record-
ing them.20 For, the fact is, there are other organic units the biologist and
ecologist could use in their study of biodiversity, such as genes or, at the
other end of the quantitative spectrum, ecosystems. Wilson tells us,
Biologists still find it useful to divide living diversity into a hierarchy of

three levels: ecosystem, species, and gene. [ . . . ] Because ecosystems are so
often hard to delimit, and because genes are difficult to identify and count,
the unit of choice in biodiversity studies remains the species, which is rela-
tively easy to diagnose and has moreover been the central object of research
for over two hundred years.21
Yet, even setting aside the difficulties of counting and identifying the
unit of species, there remain some enduring problems with the concept
of species.
The most obvious problem relating to the conceptual description of
species is simply that not all organisms are sexual and so the concept of
species doesn’t fully account for them. However, since the overwhelm-
ing majority of organisms are sexual in relative terms and furthermore
the majority of nonsexual species have evolved from sexually reproducing
ancestors, this isn’t a conceptual problem that has caused scientists to give
up on a concept that otherwise works.22 What is more problematic, and
interesting for a non-philosophical theory of nature, is the inconsistent
nature of species. As Wilson pithily states, “For species are always evolv-
ing, which means that each one perpetually changes in relation to other
species.”23 This causes a nuisance in terms of cataloguing some “sibling
species,” which are largely similar but nonetheless distinct, but more trou-
bling conceptual is hybrid species that are created within a genus.24 This is
perceived by scientists like Wilson as a problem for the concept of species
and moreover as the fundamental unit because it partly opens the gene
pool leading to the question of the identity of species as such.
However, the problem present for the ecologist is an occasion for specu-
lation for the non-philosopher. In both the standard definition of a spe-
cies as a community where the population can freely breed and in the
problem where gene pools appear to open up there is still a generic, radical
identity. In the technical language of non-philosophy this radical identity
is in-One, meaning it is Being and its Alterity or difference from other
species is secondary to its own actuality or identity, and so what we have
here is a new notion of identity than the one that Wilson is presupposing.
In the non-philosophical conception of identity the issue is fundamentally
related to actuality.25 The hybrid species is radically actual, regardless of
the inadequacy of the thought attempting to think it. This is an example
of the fundamentally unilateral relationship between the One (which is
occasional and thus not a single substance, being prior to Being, but always
manifest-without-manifestation in multiple sites) where the actuality or
identity of the hybrid species requires that thought think it, but thought
itself does not have any absolute effect (even if it may have a relative effect)
on the actuality of the hybrid. Perhaps, then, a non-philosophical solu-
tion to these enduring ecological problems could be offered by way of the
unilateral duality of identity. Keeping in mind that there is always the
absolute unilateral duality of the Real-One and some clone or identity

circumscribed in thought, in the instance of the hybrid there is a dual-
ity between the hybrid-species and the closed-species. Which is primary,
meaning which provides the radical identity for the concept of species? It
may seem, considering the requirement given by ecology for some stable
fundamental unit, that it is the closed-species that is primary. However,
this would be a quick retreat into the realms of epistemology (which scien-
tific practice is autonomous from) because it requires that ecology pass a
philosophical test regarding a closed conception of identity where stability
comes to overdetermine identity as such.
It is not the closed-species that is primary but the hybrid-species because
it is the hybrid-species that is the productive force at work in biodiversity.
Consider Wilson’s remarks against the notion of a chaotic notion of species
inherent in discarding the closed-species as fundamental:
[R]eproductive isolation between breeding populations is the point of no

return in the creation of biological diversity. During the earliest stages of
divergence, there may be less difference between the two species than exists
as variation within them. A surge of hybrids may yet occur to erase the bar-
rier and confuse the picture even more. But in most cases the two species
are embarked on an endless journey that will carry them further and fur-
ther apart. The differences between them will carry them further and fur-
ther apart. The differences between them will in time far exceed anything
possible among the members of their own breeding populations. In the
real world, the great range of biological diversity has been generated by the
divergence of species that were created in turn by the defining step expressed
in the biological-species [what I have been called closed-species].26
While Wilson feels it necessary to protect the closed-species concept, in

part because of other population biologists who are “enchanted by the
dynamism of the speciation process and the many problems thrown up to
embarrass the biological-species concept in the early stages of species sepa-
ration,” this doesn’t appear necessary from a conceptual standpoint. For, as
Wilson himself states, reproductive isolation is the point of no return in the
creation of biological diversity, but this isolation is yet subject to the time it
takes for the species, including hybrid ones, to diverge from each other.
Identity in the case of species could be said to be in-biodiversity. What
is primary in the species concept is not a closed gene pool, but the drive
toward diversity playing even on these closed gene pools. This gives a
certain unified character to the conception of biodiversity and one that
will be extended to philosophy and theology as ecosystems (of) thought.
What is this unified character? It is applying the principles of biodiver-
sity to the concept of biodiversity itself. The biosphere is, in a radically
immanental way, both constitutive of the diversity of life on earth and

constituted in both its functioning and resilience by that diversity of life.
Thus species themselves are subject to the drive toward diversification
as individual species. Keeping in mind that the famous conception of
species-being, developed first by Feuerbach and subsequently expanded
by Marx as the German Gattungswesen, is more closely related to the
generic as already discussed. Though this relation is obscured for us now,
species and generic are closely related terms. This closeness opens up the
possibility of treating not just human beings as “species-beings,” but all
of creation itself when “species-beings” is thought through the concept of
biodiversity.
This will become clearer in part IV, but I will summarize the thrust
of the argument here. I have suggested that, on the basis of the acutal-
ist and pragmatic scientific practice of population biology, we can locate
the radical identity of species in the drive to diversity present in the way
hybrid species crack open closed gene pools. This doesn’t negate species
for population biology, since as a fundamental unit of measure it works,
but it does require that the fundamental unit be taken as occasional rather
than absolute. In practice this is already accepted. This conception of spe-
cies, derived from locating the relationship of unilateral duality operative
within it, is subjected to the very principles of biodiversity. If the resilience
of the biosphere as well as individual ecosystems is dependent upon bio-
diversity, then biodiversity is also subject to the force of diversity as well.
This has consequences for understanding the way ideas function within
ecosystems (of) thought, where the specular tendency of philosophers and
theologians is to construct an absolute or closed system. But this is always
resisted by the movement of those thoughts into a wider intellectual field
where other thinkers take up these thoughts and mutate them. It then
also has consequences for our philosophical and theological conceptions
of nature, suggesting that the notion of nature as “birth” (the meaning
of the Latin natur) may be salvageable, but not as some kind of hidden
metastable field that deplores mutations. Rather hybrids and all sorts of
perversions are birthed forth naturally in nature.
This should change our understanding of the natural. It utterly
destroys the sense of the natural carrying with it any sense of normativity
other than the normativity of immanence as such. This is an important
distinction, for normativity is not completely thrown outside of thought
or nature, but it is reconfigured from the position of an immanence or,
what amounts to the same thing here, a unified theory of philosophi-
cal theology and ecology. This will be developed at length in the next
chapter when dealing with Aquinas and Spinoza in relation to anthropo-
morphism, but here we can sketch out a formalist theory of the normative
content of this non-naturalism. By non-naturalism, again calling on the

logic of non-philosophy, I mean a conception of thinking from nature that
is no longer subservient to the natural, but to a conception of nature as
if present in the radical immanence of ecological concepts that are lived,
such as biodiversity and the niche. Here normativity is not to be found in
some nature separate from human beings, but human beings are able to
derive norms from their knowledge of ecosystems. These are extremely
limited insofar as they don’t provide models from on high, but as norms
are still relative to the absolute autonomy of the Real and thus material
that can be worked with alongside other creative labors. So a formalism
of the normative content of biodiversity can be expressed in this way: if,
as Deleuze argues in his reading of Bergson, dualism = monism then this
may also be expressed as immanence = pluralism. Deleuze’s point regard-
ing Bergson is that differences in kind (in distinction to differences in
degree) are always returned to some common virtual point where these
differences converge.27
The virtual though is not lived as such, but is produced by lived expe-
rience. Thus the virtual monism whereby the relative dualisms at work
in Bergson’s vision of reality converge are unilaterally determined by the
pluralism of generic actualities. We may thus write a corollary formalism
to the first as: pluralism = (dualism = monism) as a unilateral duality.
This would mean that the pluralism of the identity of actualities, regard-
less of their place in duration, is foreclosed to the mixture of dualism and
monism because the plurality of effects of the Real (which is One, but not
as substance or Being, but only as simple identity) produces the mixture
itself. What does this formalism then represent in terms of the normative
content produced by biodiversity? Simply that any appeal to “the natural”
will fail to find any kind of basis outside of a general affirmation of the
plural productive forces of the biosphere. In order to provide an ethics
the natural must itself be subsumed within a wider ecological framework
where that pluralism is a kind of affect undergone by ethical thinking, but
that is underdetermined by it such that it can still produce ethical state-
ments outside of a purely naturalistic conception. In this way the natural is
no longer separate from the realm of human thinking, what we might call
somewhat problematically “culture,” but is rightly seen as another perverse
production or effect of nature via human fabulation. Or, in other words,
the natural is not something absolutely transcendent to the human, but is
a population (of) thought that was produced naturally just as humans were
and subsists in various ecologies (of) thought, but as such is subject to the
wider principles of a generic ecology and immanent to those ecosystems
as such.
Niche
Biodiversity opens up to a corollary concept that ecologists refer to as the
niche. If biodiversity is the recognition that there is a principal drive to
diversification within the biosphere, niche theory is the attempt to give
shape to the functioning of biodiversity. For biodiversity is a principle
derived from the research into the proliferation (one might even say clamor)
of species that are identified by the ecologist as those populations that can
freely breed under “natural” conditions. Niche theory is able to locate the
ways that clamor comes into a stochastic harmony. This stochastic har-
mony is described by Paul S. Giller as population interaction with other
populations (this grouping of populations is called the community) and
the wider ecosystem.28 Giller clarifies the strict definition of a community
writing that a community is “a combination of plant, animal, and bacterial
populations, interacting with one another within an environment, thus
forming a distinctive living system with its own composition, structure,
environmental relations, development and function.”29
Niches are tied more closely to the community rather than the ecosys-
tem as a whole, though again the confusion with regard to scale of ecosys-
tems makes this a somewhat unclear point. Giller helps clarify the place
of the niche when he writes, “The ecological niche is a reflection of the
organism’s or species’ place in the community, incorporating not only tol-
erances to physical factors, but also interactions with other organisms.”30
In a nontechnical sense, though nonetheless true, niche refers to what lines
of sustenance are open to the organism or species. That is, a niche is that
place, within a network or mesh of interactions (these are always approxi-
mate analogies for the mathematical model of the energy exchange), where
an organism can find enough energy to continue to live while passing on
its genetic information. Now the niche of one species may be wide enough
to allow that species to spread across the ecosystem, and even, as in the case
of human beings, to dominate the ecosystems they exist within. This idea
of domination refers to the intensity of the effects that this species has on
the particular ecosystem. So the human being has obviously had a high
magnitude of effects on the ecosystems they inhabit and has even shaped
them. This limits the niches of other animals, while opening up other
niches. If the human species were to disappear the ecosystems they had
inhabited would no doubt change fundamentally, which is not necessarily
true of species who have smaller niche widths.31
In practice most organisms and species are limited or “checked” by
other organisms and species. This should not suggest a rather medieval
notion of hierarchy based on an anthropocentric understanding of power,

but in ecological theory hierarchy is always more complex and open to
reconceptions of power more akin to the focus on potentiality that has
been somewhat common in European political philosophy since the 1970s.
For bacteria, that black hole of biodiversity, may end up being a dominant
species or at least one that checks the niche width of other organisms and
species in a significant way. This may seem like a strange statement but it
is because “in the real world” the environmental gradient (or space) where
niches exist “is not measured in ordinary Euclidean dimensions but in
fractal dimensions. Size depends on the span of the measuring stick or,
more precisely, on the size of the foraging ambit of the organisms dwell-
ing on the tree. In the fractal world, an entire ecosystem can exist in the
plumage of a bird.”32
Yet, even with this n- dimensional space of the bird’s plumage or the
single stick in the forest, there is always some check on the hypervolume.
This check is referred to as the principle of competitive exclusion, which
holds that if two or more species coexist there should be some ecological
difference between them.33 This is not an ironclad law as Wilson reminds
his readers. For even though one dynasty of species cannot tolerate another
dynasty of a closely similar kind and “when one group radiates into a part
of the world, another group must retreat,” this is only a statistical tendency
that clues the ecologist in to the likelihood of some ecological diversity at
work where two seemingly similar species do coexist.34 There is something
interesting at work here, which tells us something about the weakness of a
crude quantitative measure with regard to dealing with the ethical issues
raised by ecology, for it may seem that a species should simply be consid-
ered endangered if it has a relatively small quantitative population. Yet, it
is its niche width that is really the matter of concern, such that a popula-
tion can be large and even widespread, but if its niche is scarce the species
resilience is weak and it is threatened. A change in the wider community
structure could lead to disaster for the species.35
Already discussed earlier, there has been some critical noise from phi-
losophers like Slavoj Žižek concerning the supposedly ecological ideology
of “balance.” What Žižek is really referring to is not ecology as such, but
certain notions that are found in popular quasi-green discourse. These
forms of discourse can be called quasi green because they are actually old
notions, more mechanistic and theological as Botkin and others trace the
history of ideas, which are easy for mediatic public intellectuals to use as
well as members of the paid commentariat whose job it is to have opin-
ions about all public matters regardless of their own lack of precision or
knowledge. The concept of niche is a good example where the philosopher
goes wrong with his vision, where the attention he gives is determined by
his philosophical faith, allowing him to cast derision on the unthinking

scientist, and so he may see the niche as the old philosophical idea of bal-
ance. Or take the theologian, with his own faithful attention, who may see
in the niche nothing but an ontology of violence. In truth, neither balance
nor ontological violence is required by the concept of the niche when it is
placed in an immanental posture and extended to thought itself.
The concept of the niche has to be thought through the concept of
the never-living (discussed more in the next section), rather than in the
dialectic of life and death that both the philosopher and theologian persist
in thinking through. While we deal more in the final chapter with the
ethical problems manifest in ecological theory, for now the point need only
be made that the niche concept is only part of a wider theory. It does not
overdetermine the value of species without there being some hidden phi-
losophy or theology behind it. What the niche concept does point to is a
generic posture of all living organisms. Not that of violence, if by violence
one means Greek agon or of the violence committed against the hostage,
but of immanental struggle in the World as separate from the notion of a
“whole.” Each community is a stranger to the biosphere insofar as it can
be identified as a community and if it plays its part in the functioning of
the whole it does so without some kind of intentionality. The biosphere
simply is the various community-identities functioning within the same
n-dimensional space.
The niche is both a model of immanence in the ecosystem and a
stumbling block to standard philosophical conceptions of Nature as
read in tooth and claw, as primary qualities, and also of the New Age-y
conceptions of balance. Of course, anyone would be delusional to claim
that nature isn’t violent, that in nature and all its perverse manifestations
there isn’t some affective field of sorrow and mourning. But there is also a
fundamental joy and this is expressed also in the productive powers seen
in the niche. Ecology breaks with philosophical naturalism insofar as the
scientific practices of ecology, which are able to locate niches and biodi-
versity, require no simple reduction to “the natural.” This is not to say that
individual ecologists may not believe in some form of naturalism, but that
this belief will always ultimately be external to the immediacy of their
practice and even from the underlying principles and concepts of ecology.
But the niche, outside of any reduction and remaining radically immanent
to the lived aspect of the species, witnesses to the underlying perversity of
nature. One might even say a “joyous perversity,” if by that one means that
the creation of the niche witnesses to the species living without regard for
death.
New species come into existence. This is the protest of the immeasur-
able perversity of nature against the notion of Nature at work in ideas of
“the natural.” This form of naturalism lies at the heart of philosophy’s

ruminations concerning nature going back to Heraclitus’s aphorism usu-
ally translated as “Nature loves to hide” but that Pierre Hadot suggests
is better translated in one of two ways: “What causes things to appear
tends to make them disappear (i.e., what causes birth tends to cause
death). Form (or appearance) tends to disappear (i.e., what is born wants
to die).”36 Such being-toward-death has dominated philosophical concep-
tions of nature. But this is true of Christian theological conceptions inso-
far as Paul’s theology of Creation, which states that “the present form of
this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7.31 NRSV) is at the heart of Christian
ideas about nature. In both cases the present form of nature naturally
tends toward death and this natural tendency at work over and against the
living is what determines all thinking concerning nature. Nature becomes
another name for the realm of violence. But nature reconceived through
a non-philosophical unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology
(remembering that nature is not the object of ecology, but is an effect pro-
duced from the Real, which can be thought using the tools of ecology) can
move past the natural and thus past the overdetermination of the dialectic
of life and death.
The niche is the production of the living against the requirement of
death at work also in nature. Yet, this protest would be in vain if it simply
hoped to overcome death by destroying death. Biologists have a name for
the living form of this desire—they call it cancer. For cancer is simply a
living cell refusing to expire, refusing the programmed death of apoptosis
and thus destroying the wider system it is within. The niche is an expres-
sion of protest against the necessity of death insofar as it pays no attention
to death as such. Death never determines the niche in the way it determines
philosophical ethics or religious fantasies of overcoming death.
We can illustrate this argument by way of a creative recasting of the
persona of Job, a persona that has been used both by philosophers and
theologians. For if we think of the niche as a resistance to death, as a resis-
tance to the terms set by Nature that philosophers hallucinate, we see an
underlying identity common to the immanence of the niche and that of
Job. What the niche shows is that we can discuss nature as perverse against
the terms set by Nature, just as Job perversely stood up against the terms
set by God in refusing to accept what his friends had hallucinated to be the
parameters set by God. I will use the construction of Job found in Antonio
Negri’s The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor
(2009) because of its ontological and ethical reading (the two are the same
thing for Negri and, he argues, for Job). In other words, being and ethics
are not divided and separated in the story of Job. If this is true then neither
is the human and nonhuman divided and separated, for both share some
common ontological basis, the same basis that Negri reads into Job (while
himself not going as far to the creatural generic as we are): the experience
of immense, immeasurable pain. Here the biblical text is not a parable of
human labor alone, but of generic creatural labor.
According to Negri’s reading of Job, this figure is not pitiful as he stands
in pain against a backdrop of tragedy, but is a figure of power as ability
or potentiality against Power as constituted and oppressive. In his power
Job calls the amoral omnipotence of the divine to account for itself. Such
a demand is rhetorically complex, for the protest of Job must not make
an appeal to God simply as judge, for “God is both one of the parties and
the judge. The trial is therefore a fraud.”37 For when Job opens his mouth
he will have already condemned himself before the one who judges, as he
himself says in the text:
Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him;

I must appeal for mercy to my accuser.
If I summoned him and he answered me,
I do not believe he would listen to my voice.
For he crushes me with a tempest,
And multiplies my wounds without cause;
He will not let me get my breath
But fills me with bitterness.
If it is a contest of strength, he is the strong one!
If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?
Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me;
Thought I am blameless, he would prove me perverse. (Job 9.15–20
NRSV)
By making a defense Job would have to capitulate to the value of justice

implicit in the omnipotence of the divine. He would capitulate to an image
of value whereby it is just that God, as immeasurable Power, is both the
judge and a party to the trial. But in refusing to demand such a trial, in
demanding that the omnipotent reveal himself, there is a recognition of
the impossibility of a real dialectics in the face of the immeasurable. This
parallels precisely the same problem of orthodox theology that sees only
death in the struggle of niches as well as in the naturalist who sees “the
natural” as the immeasurable Power and source of value.
Negri thinks this relationship and its refusal in the light of the political
and philosophical problem of measure:
The immeasurable has become disproportion, imbalance, organic prevalence

of God over man. The fact that God is presented as immeasurable dem-
onstrates—once again—that all dialectics are impossible. The trial is not
dialectical, it is not and cannot be. It is not dialectical because it cannot be

“overcome”; or rather, it can be only by negating one of the terms—but this
is not dialectics, it is destruction.38
Instead Job matches this immeasurable of Power with the immeasurable of

his pain. “The book of Job exhibits a sarcastic existentialism that, through
pain, denies all dialectics and understands being only as creation. [ . . . ] It
is necessary to develop power having registered (and dominated) its irre-
ducible passive content and the pain of which power is the daughter.”39
Power in the sense of ability to act or potentiality is the daughter of pain.
The creature, as witnessed to most obviously for human beings in the
human creature, is able to turn the immeasurability of pain into a source
of immeasurable charity and grace. Pain becomes a means of grace, but
not a means that comes from the outside of the creature, but an immanent
means to the suffering flesh. The immeasurable of charity shares in the
immeasurability of pain, for both are that which measures. They become
the true measure as immeasurable, as that which can never be measured
much like the never-living is beyond the measure of the dialectic of life and
death (more on this later). Pain and grace/charity measure the World and
reveal that the immeasurability of the world is an immeasurable shame; as
a system organized by death and alienation as common (somewhat differ-
ent from Negri’s use of the concept of World and closer to Laruelle’s gnos-
tic understanding) the World is but a hallucination of value. Rather, the
creation of the World is birthed from the pain and grace of the creatural
earth and sea. The World is only absolute as a contingency of creation.
Again, consider the words of Negri when he writes:
But charity cannot be measured because it allows us to participate in the

power of creation. In this way the problem of the reconstruction of value
can be placed on a new footing. When power opposes Power, it has become
divine. It is the source of life. It is the superabundance of charity. The world
can be reconstructed on this basis, and only what is reconstructed in this
way will have value; it will continue to not have a measure, because the
power that creates has no measure.40
Death orders the World because death becomes a common measure to

all of life.41 But in pain this common measure is rendered as simply the
object of desire—a desire to eliminate death and pain. To subsume the
relative measurable cause of the immeasurable of suffering into a messianic
future where the immeasurable of grace reigns. Such grace is the power of
production produced by pain. In the story of Job there is a direct correla-
tion between the mismatched dialectical relationship between God and
the human being that produces suffering. Job breaks this mismatched dia-
lectic by seeing God. By his protest Job demands that God reveal himself
and in so doing Job tears away the absolute transcendence of God. By
seeing God, through the immeasurability of God revealed as a body open
to vision, Job is able to share in the divine. The immeasurable character of
pain and grace is no longer organized hierarchically, but through a simple
vision, a knowledge that is salvific. Such vision is creation according to
Negri and it is worth quoting his ecstatic hymn to creation at length:
Job speaks of grace, of the prophecy that anticipates the Messiah. “To see
God” is certainly not a moral experience, nor is it merely an intellectual
experience. Here the interpreters of the book of Job do what Job’s inter-
locutors, form Eliphaz to Bildad, from Zophar to Elihu, had done: they
confine to a given form and measure his experience within the dimensions
of the theologically known. And yes, what an incredible experience has
unfolded to this point! I have seen God, thus God is torn from the abso-
lute transcendence that constitutes the idea of him. God justifies himself,
thus God is dead. He saw God, hence Job can speak of him, and he—Job
himself—can in turn participate in divinity, in the function of redemption
that man constructs within life—the instrument of the death of God that
is human constitution and the creation of the world. [ . . . ] The antagonism
between life and death is resolved in favor of life. My life is the recognition
of you—my eyes have seen you. I am. Man is. The backdrop is not modi-
fied. It is dominated by the great forces of destruction and death. But man
reorganizes himself so as to resist this disease. Creation is the going beyond
death. Creation is the content of the vision of God . Creation is the meaning
of life.42
Now, while Negri’s ecstatic materialist philosophy (in a way altogether

unlike the materialism of most contemporary mainstream Anglophone
philosophy) is inspiring, there are certain differences I must mark out. For,
from a non-philosophical perspective, Negri tarries dangerously close to
affirming the convertibility of life and death, but this antagonism must be
seen as formed within the lived. There is no death without the lived, ulti-
mately, but from the perspective of an expanded theory of creatural labor
there is a requirement for the recognition of the never-living. The immea-
surable of man is indeed pain, but the creation of pain arises out of the rela-
tionship between the living, the dead, and the never-living. Thus, whether
it is the dialectic between life and death or a nondialectical relationship
between the two, there is a third term that stands apart from this relation-
ship and determines it. This is neither God nor the Being of man where
the singular meets the universal, but simply the earth as such (and by this
I am of course expressing under a more poetic name the biosphere, which
includes earth, ocean, atmosphere, molten lava, etc.). The never-living

aspect of potential action, the appeal to the earth as immeasurable source
of creation, is what allows for Job to go beyond not just death, but also
the life that births it. For what is it that God appeals to in his justifica-
tion of himself? In Chapters 38–41, where God makes his justification, he
appeals to creation, including all the living things as well as some fantastic
chimerical monsters that do not exist. These monsters, the behemoth and
the leviathan, are interpreted philosophically by Negri, respectively, as pri-
mordial force and the primordial chaos and violence that are the ground
of production, without measure or law.43 In appealing to his strength, his
Power, God shows Power to be contingent on being able to master this
ground. Interestingly, in the biblical text, while God takes credit for the
creation of both he never comes out and says that he can control them, but
in a rather bombastic style depending on a series of rhetorical questions
merely suggests this.
So what does this ancient biblical story have to do with the contempo-
rary ecological concept of the niche? Negri’s retelling of Job is not merely
a parable in a weak sense, but it is an argument concerning the ontologi-
cal constitution of power as resisting Power. The lived reality of what it
means to be a human subject in pain. We can extend the persona of Job
to creation generally simply by changing some of the terms. So, rather
than Job innocently suffering in the face of a disproportionate and amoral
Power, we have all creatures suffering before a disproportionate and amoral
Power of Nature. Again, I use the uppercase here to signal that I’m writing
about a particular idea of nature, a hallucination of something absolute
in its transcendence to creatures akin to the hallucination of God. This is
Nature hypostasized, the same Nature found in the naturalism of philoso-
phers appealed to for the grounding of ontological and normative claims.44
The creation of a niche by a species witnesses to the contingency of such
a Nature. It would not exist without perverse production on earth of new
species. Every time a new species emerges and a niche is formed (remember
immanence is at work here) the suffering of that species calls for Nature
to account for itself. If this cry of violence from the earth and the response
from Nature were to be given in language, what could Nature appeal to in
its justification? For the violence at work in creation is not immeasurable.
It may be overwhelming at times. It may even be evil. But, it is always rela-
tive and dependent upon the creation of niches for its existence and in this
way the niche, the creature, is not alienated in its identity by that violence.
By coming into the ecosystem, exchanging energy, it comes to resist and
go beyond death, if only for a moment. The creativity of the niche is the
immeasurable and as such is a certain site of the perversity of nature. Just
as Job was perverse in his acceptance of God’s unlimited Power and yet
still required that God answer for it, so the niche is perverse in the face of
the unlimited Power of Nature.
What is common to creatural being is pain. One species causes pain to
another in the working out of niche boundaries. But corollary to this pain
is the necessity for biodiversity that niches witness to. There is then a cer-
tain creatural sociality as universality at work in the pain of living among
one another.45 This pain is primary and emotions such as fear or anger are
but secondary effects that are contingent upon the organization of that
pain in the creatural socius. Even violence is secondary to this pain, insofar
as that violence can be turned into a peaceable force by way of creation.
It isn’t my intent to argue for an overturning of death in the ecosystem,
but simply to disempower death, just as Job disempowers God. The niche
shows that death, as well as life, is secondary to a more immanent creative
power at work as nature against Nature. Niches witness to the exile of
nature from hypostasized Nature. The refusal of the value of Nature as
hallucination of the immeasurable in the name of a grace of nature that is
witnessed to in the perverse creative power of new species producing ways
of living indifferently to death.
Exchange of Matter and Energy
Up until this point I have only covered what could be referred to as the liv-
ing and dead elements of ecology as seen through the concept of the ecosys-
tem. At this point we need to transition to those elements normally called
abiotic, but which the Chicago-based Irish ecologist and philosopher Liam
Heneghan refers to as the “never-living.” These never-living elements are
outside any dialectic of life and death, a dialectic that operates as a homol-
ogy where there is a pure confusion of bodies, and this dialectic continues
to haunt contemporary philosophies and theologies of nature through their
connection to the biopolitical.46 Because of this homology the ecological
conception of the never-living can actually provide a more generic matrix
than either neovitalism or nihilistic thought, which is actually based on the
anthropocentric notion of extinction, and in so doing may avoid their mis-
takes by opening up a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology
to a freer, more radically immanent, conception of nature.
In this section I will turn to that element that unifies the living, the
dead, and the never-living: the exchange of matter and energy. Energy
exchange, also called energy flow, is the productive force at work in the
ecosystem and is also constitutive of the ecosystem. Not in a purely unitary
way, as if one term were transcendent to the other, or in a way where the two
terms are simply reversible, but in the sense that the radical identity of the
ecosystem and energy are dual. For analysis of the ecosystem and energy
seeks “to understand the factors that regulate the pools (quantities) and
fluxes (flows) of materials and energy through ecological systems.”47 The
terms are not reversible because their identities can be located, even where
these identities are always in the midst of the others. Not in a relationship
of reciprocity, but simply and radically in-One as the biosphere. Take, for
example, the “net ecosystem production,” which is the name given to the
net accumulation of carbon by an ecosystem.48 It would be too simple,
and all too philosophical and theological, to reduce all the aspects of the
ecosystem to being in some sense “carbon.” As if all the living and dead
elements of an ecosystem could be simply thought of as flows of carbon
akin to a computer code. However, this would fail to make any sense of
the exchange of carbon, the study of which shows that individuals or actu-
alities store and transfer carbon. Without an understanding of the radical
identity of these actualities ecologists would be silent in the face of the flux
and pools of carbons and yet, against such temptation, ecologists do speak
and can trace the carbon balance as it enters the ecosystem through gross
primary production (photosynthesis) and leaves through several other pro-
cesses.49 In plain terms, plants are not “merely” carbon flows, because they
have processes that are radically separate from the identity of carbon.
We can make the claim, borrowed from Marxism and mutated in
Laruelle’s non-Marxism, that every exchange is the productive force [force
(de) production] of work in ecology and still remain scientifically inoffen-
sive. Energy is defined rather pragmatically in ecology, drawing on ther-
modynamics, as the ability to do work.50 This definition of energy was
first adapted for scientific ecology by Howard Thomas Odum, brother of
Eugene Odum discussed earlier. Howard Thomas Odum used the cyber-
netic theories of the 1950s alongside of the general laws related to energy
derived from research in theoretical physics to develop theories about and
research projects concerning energy flow.51 This definition of energy is
given alongside the two laws of thermodynamics by Odum:
Energy is defined as the ability to do work. The behavior of energy is

described by the following laws. The first law of thermodynamics states that
energy may be transformed from one type into another but is never created
or destroyed . . . The second law of thermodynamics may be stated in several
ways, including the following: No process involving an energy transforma-
tion will spontaneously occur unless there is a degradation of the energy
from a concentrated form into a dispersed form.52
This pragmatic definition of energy allows the ecologist to locate the

immanent process of energy in food webs, the productivity of species, the
various cycles of biogeochemical elements such as carbon and nitrogen,

and the other aspects of the ecosystem, without overdetermining the iden-
tities of these elements as energy.
Without reducing ecology simply to non-philosophy, there is neverthe-
less some validation of Laruelle’s conception of non-philosophy’s scientific
character for in ecology there remains a unilateral duality at work. There
is energy/matter and there are the various organisms that are in process
through the energy flows, but ultimately there is a weak autonomy of
the organism in relation to energy and matter and a radical autonomy of
energy. This can be seen more clearly when you consider that all energy
exchange takes place within some system or organization that is either
open or closed. Lévêque summarizes the system of energy exchange across
the biosphere (or earth) this way: “The earth is an open thermodynamic
system: the flow of solar energy (high energy photons) that penetrate the
biosphere are gradually transformed into work and heat, which is ulti-
mately dissipated into space in the form of infrared radiation (low energy
photons).”53 Chapin, Matson, and Mooney’s description helps round this
out when they write, “Most ecosystems gain energy from the sun and
materials from the air or rocks, transfer these among components within
the ecosystem, then release energy and materials to the environment.”54
In other words, the biosphere is an open system that receives energy
anew each day from the sun, which is stored in living organisms and
released through various processes, including death. The identity of the
organisms is then unilaterally determined by energy and material in a
sense that avoids the necessity of a philosophical materialism or reduction.
For, at the start of the energy cycle is the radiation from the sun. This is
captured by plants, which in turn transfer this energy to animals as well as
microorganisms. In each case the organism is dependent at some point in
time on a single flux of energy that takes a different form every time as it
is transformed and turned into work and heat by abiotic elements such as
water, atmosphere, and soil materials (which are themselves derived from
rocks that have been broken down).55 As Lévêque states, “The emphasis
is on the notion of flux and no longer only on that of mass.”56 Thus the
ecosystem is an open flux, insofar as it both derives its energy from out-
side the system and energy is lost from the system.57 This openness can
be described as a “constant dissipation of energy” that takes place in the
food webs where energy is turned into material by decomposers and then
used by autotrophs (organisms that extract raw materials from the min-
eral world and synthesize all the molecules needed for their functioning—
plants are a common example).58
How can this energy be understood from the perspective of an ecosys-
tem (of) thought? In the introduction to this chapter I made the claim that
thought can be treated like a real ecosystem and as part of a real ecosys-
tem. From an ecological perspective thought is also dependent upon this
single source of energy. For thought to do work it requires energy. A simple
and likely obvious statement, but one that is rarely considered when doing
philosophical or theological work. But do thoughts decompose? Do they
live and die, passing on their energy to something else? Let us hazard a yes
and let this yes be said without an appeal to crude scientism or reductive
materialism. But this yes must also be said without an appeal to pseudo-
science or narcissistic notions that our thought creates reality. What then
would it mean? An enigmatic answer: thought transfers its energy in the
everyday. What this means is that thought is an ecological process just as
respiration or the carbon cycle is. The function of this “just” needs to be
clarified. For the point isn’t that thought is “just material” as if we knew
that the value of material was low from the perspective of human freedom.
Rather, the point is that thought and the rest of the ecosystem has a certain
equivalency in terms of their relative autonomy in relation to the radi-
cal autonomy of the never-living. Thought isn’t something to deride, but
neither is it something divine that can only secure its divinity by debasing
what is taken to be beneath it. Thought carries with it energy that can be
transferred to other forms of thought, can animate wider ecosystems (of)
thought, or can be used to direct action. But in this way thought remains
relative, it has no absolute autonomy, but is unilaterally determined, at
least on this refractory planet, by the sun and so any animation or action is
always as a custodian rather than a master.
So this is not a metaphor. I am claiming that within thought there is
energy that is transferred among living thought, dead thought, and the
never-living of thought. The definition of energy inherited from general
thermodynamics guides us here: energy for thought is the ability to do work.
Thus we don’t need to make any appeals to an already existing materialist
philosophy or to a reductionist account of thinking that says thought “just
is” energy. Such claims are often incoherent for they are dependent upon a
circle of meaning that they claim to escape. For many such claims are often
pitched against the reenchantment of the World and in favor of a further
disenchantment. Consider the words of Ray Brassier who claims that
the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the pro-

cess whereby the Enlightenment shattered the “great chain of being” and
defaced the “book of the world” is a necessary consequence of the corus-
cating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual
discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. [ . . . ] The disenchant-
ment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual
maturity, not bewailed as debilitating impoverishment.59
So, reducing the World to a set of “just is” propositions is supposed to bear
witness to a sign of “intellectual maturity” for they show that the thinker
is involved in thinking the truth regardless of what that truth may be. The
consequence of this rhetoric is obviously intended to turn the reductionist
into a kind of hero of truth, but surely the hero just is valorizing himself
within a circle of meaning it hasn’t been able to reduce in its practice.
Instead of playing such competing games of meaning, why not think as
the wave of energy. Disinterested in the World, whether it is enchanted or
not, but acting nonetheless. For thought clearly begins with energy. When
I sit to think about an ecosystem (of) thought my body is burning calories.
My body that is thinking requires energy; it requires that I eat if I am to
think. It requires too that I have eaten well, that I have eaten nutritious
food throughout the living action of my body. For nutrition is necessary
for my brain to form synapses correctly and allow for synaptic connec-
tions. These connections and the thought that is thought are immanent
to one another. For while these connections allow for the production of
thought, they indeed are the production of thought, they do not occur
within a vacuum. For when I think I do so with the ideas of others, with
common notions as well as with presuppositions. These play a part in the
form of whatever thought I go on to think. For example, when I sit down
to read Spinoza’s Ethics there is a transfer of thoughtful energy from the
dead thought on the page to the living thought transforming the mate-
rial of the dead thought in the midst of my thinking it. Writing is but a
material trace of the living thought that provides the material energizing
the living thought. Ideas thus exhibit an energy-like quality. When I read
the ideas of some thinker I am able to do work with my own thought. My
own thought is able to perhaps do the same for another body of thinking.
The reality of this image of thought (seen from the vision-in-One) is more
adequate to what actually happens when we think. For we do not think
with perfect understanding, simply repeating the master, but always akin
to taking some material from one world to another. Sometimes that matter
is carried on our shoe, sometimes in a new configuration of our body. But
this is how we actually think in the moment: contaminated, energized,
and without the transcendent master.
Space and Time
The exchange of matter and energy is an important never-living aspect

of ecological theory. But ecosystem structure and functioning are gov-
erned by at least five independent control variables called “state factors”:
“climate, parent material (i.e., the rocks that give rise to soil), topogra-
phy, potential biota (i.e., the organisms present in the region that could
potentially occupy a site), and time.”60 Of these we have effectively covered
potential biota (biodiversity), parent material (material exchange), and to
some extent climate insofar as climate is closely linked with the energy
flow. Space and time are important elements of the ecosystem process, but
how they are important can be illuminating of the general structure of
ecosystems (of) thought generally as well as questioning the commonsense
views of time and space.
There is no real need for technical language in this section, for the
effects of space on ecosystems are relatively obvious. Ecosystems are par-
tially determined by where they are on the planet in relation to where the
sun is. That climate may also be determined in part by landform effects.
For example, mountain ranges affect local climate through what are called
“orographic effects,” simply referring to the presence of the mountain. One
example of this is what is called a “rain shadow,” or zone of low precipita-
tion downwind of the mountains caused by the cooling and condensation
of air moving up the windward side of the mountains. Deserts and steppes
often exist because of their downwind proximity to a mountain range.61
Time functions in a similar way and Chapin, Matson, and Mooney
summarize the importance of time in ecosystem processes this way: “Time
influences the development of soil and the evolution of organism over long
time scales. Time also incorporates the influences on ecosystem processes
of past disturbances and environmental change over a wide range of time
scales.”62 For organisms too there is a temporal element in their ecosystem
functioning that is important if one is to understand the overall ecological
processes at work: “Many species may change their trophic level [i.e., where
they can be placed in terms of the exchange of matter and energy] during
their life cycle. A fish may be planktivorous in the larval stage, a consumer
of invertebrates in the juvenile stage, and piscivorous in the adult stage.”63
Ecological processes take time and in time there is a certain heterogeneous
character to the ecosystem and its elements that can be witnessed.
What is common to both space and time in ecological theory is their
heterogeneity. Lévêque goes so far as to claim that there is a “consensus”
in ecology “that nature is heterogeneous.”64 He goes on to define spatial
heterogeneity as existing from either a static or dynamic point of view.
“An environment is heterogeneous if a qualitative or quantitative variable,
such as plant cover or air temperature, has different values in different
places. However, in functional terms, heterogeneity is also apparent when
there is a change in the intensity of functional processes in response to
variations in the structure of the environment.”65 He goes on to define
temporal heterogeneity writing that “[t]emporal heterogeneity, more often
called temporal variability, can be defined simply by the different values

taken by a variable in a single point of space as a function of time.”66 The
two dimensions are closely related, though, such that “structural heteroge-
neity can be defined as the complexity and variability of a property of an
ecosystem in time and space.”67
This underlying heterogeneity is an affront to a popular strand of envi-
ronmental philosophy that has arisen in response to the practice of eco-
logical restoration. Ecological restoration is often faulted for a confusion at
the temporal level for the restorationist aims to restore some ecosystem to
some prior state. This prior state is often chosen on the basis of something
somewhat arbitrary. For instance, in the context of the American Midwest
prairie, there are attempts to restore the prairie ecosystem simply because
of the rarity of the prairie at the global level. The ecosystem that replaced
the prairie functions, but it is also rather homogenous and common
throughout the neo-Europes (a name Crosby gives to those ecosystems
that have come to closely resemble the ecosystem structure of Europe link-
ing European social imperialism with an ecological imperialism as well).68
Yet for Eric Katz, one of the harsh philosophical critics of ecological resto-
ration, there is an underlying problem here of authenticity. Katz writes,
A “restored” nature is an artefact created to meet human satisfactions and

interests. Thus, on the most fundamental level, it is an unrecognized mani-
festation of the insidious dream of the human domination of nature. Once
and for all, humanity will demonstrate its mastery of nature by “restor-
ing” and repairing the degraded ecosystems of the biosphere. Cloaked in an
environmental consciousness, human power will reign supreme.69
He goes on to compare the restored ecosystem to a piece of forged art

as if the ecosystem were analogous to an artistic creation.70 Yet he passes
over so-called artifacts made by nonhuman animals, like a beaver dam,
suggesting that only human beings are able to create artifacts and exist
outside nature.71 But a philosophical notion like authenticity isn’t able to
understand the ecosystem because the identity of its space and time simply
is heterogeneity.
Resilience
Resilience is a recent ecological concept that is important to ecological man-

agement, of which ecological restoration is a part. The notion of manage-
ment is somewhat tainted, especially for radical thinkers, by the association
it has with techno-capitalist biopower. However, management in an eco-

logical context, while it may refer to certain kinds of nefarious biopolitical
aspects of the human-social relationship with the wider biosphere, tends
to refer simply to a more intentional and scientifically grounded relation-
ship with the natural world. Resilience thinking begins first by rejecting
any kind of dualism between humans and nature, because human beings
are a part of ecological processes: “We are all part of linked systems of
humans and nature” which are referred to as “social-ecological systems.” 72
This notion of a social-ecological system is important for dissolving false
problems common to environmental thought, specifically with regard to
the notion of “sustainability.” Radkau’s history of social-ecological systems
shows that most environmental management decisions tend to be made
with a poor understanding of the system in general. Walker and Salt sug-
gest that this poor decision comes from focusing on “isolated components
of the system.”73 Such an approach is common to the economic approach
to ecological management with its focus on “efficiency” and “optimiza-
tion.” But in a dynamic system like the biosphere there is no simple “opti-
mal” state as present in economic reasoning where one simply needs to be
more efficient with resources.74
What Walker and Salt show through five case studies is that most
attempts to optimize simple elements of a complex social-ecological sys-
tem lead to a diminishing of that system’s resilience.75 Walker and Salt
put this starkly writing, “A drive for an efficient optimal state outcome
has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and
disturbances.”76 Against this economically modeled idea of optimization
resilience thinking begins from the simple idea that “things change” and
“to ignore or resist this change is to increase our vulnerability and forego
emerging opportunities. In so doing, we limit our options.”77 Change is in
and of itself value neutral because “[t]here is no such thing as an optimal
state of a dynamic system. The systems in which we live are always shift-
ing, always changing, and in so doing they maintain their resilience—
their ability to withstand shocks and to keep delivering what we want.”78
So resilience focuses on two central research themes: thresholds and
adaptive cycles. These two themes underpin resilience thinking and it
is worth quoting Walker and Salt’s definitions at length because of their
clarity:
Thresholds: Social-ecological systems can exist in more than one kind of

stable state. If a system changes too much it crosses a threshold and beings
behaving in a different way, with different feedbacks between its compo-
nent parts and a different structure. It is said to have undergone a “regime
shift.” [ . . . ]
Adaptive cycles: The other central theme to a resilience approach is

how social-ecological systems change over time—systems dynamics.
Social-ecological systems are always changing. A useful way to think about
this is to conceive of the system moving through four phases: rapid growth,
conservation, release, and reorganization—usually, but not always, in that
sequence. This is known as the adaptive cycle and these cycles operate over
many different scales of time and space. The manner in which they are linked
across scales is crucially important for the dynamics of the whole set.79
The rest of this section will focus on filling out these concepts.
Walker and Salt illustrate the thresholds theme with a simple analogy.
Imagine that the system is a ball and that ball is placed within a basin that
indexes the system’s “state” variables. A simple system could be simply the
number of fish and the number of fishers, but it is important to keep in
mind that a system is of course fractal and is thus n-dimensional. Now
within this basin the ball will tend to roll toward the bottom, that is, in
system’s terms, it tends toward equilibrium. But equilibrium is not static
and is rather always changing based on the changing external conditions
and so the shape of the basin is itself always changing as the conditions
themselves change. The shape of the basin can change so much, meaning
the conditions can change so much, that the ball can suddenly find itself
rolling into a new basin with a different fundamental organization. To put
some flesh on this example, say a particular linchpin species has a small
niche width due to some other external change. If that species continues
to be pushed out of the ecosystem functioning toward extinction, then the
system will fundamentally change. While prior to this change you could
adjust on the basis of that species, that possibility is no longer open to you
because the structure of the basin has fundamentally changed.80 Walker
and Salt summarize this thus: “Once a threshold has been crossed it is
usually difficult (in some cases impossible) to cross back.”81 Furthermore,
sustainability requires that we learn if and where thresholds exist and fig-
ure out how to manage the capacity of the system in relation to those
thresholds.82
Adaptive cycles give some organization to the changes that occur with
ecosystems. “One important aspect about cycles is recognizing that things
happen in different ways according to the phase of the cycle the system
happens to be in.”83 There are four phases to the adaptive cycle: the rapid
growth phase (or r phase), the conservation phase (or K phase), the release
phase (or Ω phase), and the reorganization phase (or α phase). The r phase
is the early period of the system where there is rapid growth “as species or
people [ . . . ] exploit new opportunities and available resources.”84 During
this phase species are exploiting every possible niche and the system is
weakly interconnected and has a weakly regulated internal state. The K

phase occurs when connections between different actors increase and all
competitive advantage moves to those actors who can “reduce the impact of
variability through their own mutually reinforcing relationships.”85 During
this phase the system becomes more and more rigid, which increases effi-
ciency but results in a loss of flexibility. The Ω phase occurs when some
shock occurs to the rigid K phase. Walker and Salt claim that “[t]he longer
the conservation phase persists the smaller the shock needed to end it.”86
This results in a certain ecological form of “creative destruction” as all the
resources that were tightly bound within their relationships are suddenly
free and released to new relationships. This phase leads quickly to the α
phase where “[s]mall, chance events have the opportunity to powerfully
shape the future. Invention, experimentation, and reassortment are the
order of the day.”87 During the Ω phase there is no stable equilibrium, the
counters of the basin are not operative. “The reorganization phase begins
to sort out the players and to constrain the dynamics. The end of the reor-
ganization phase and the beginning of the rapid growth phase is marked
by the appearance of a new attractor, a new ‘identity.’”88
Now Walker and Salt also tell us that this description of the adaptive
cycle does not necessarily lead to resilient systems that we would want to
encourage. In fact, the adaptive cycle could end in the ecological equivalent
of a poverty trap if the cycle were to happen within a basin that already has
constrained options through homogeneity. Moreover, though this descrip-
tion of the cycle is generally the way a system passes through the phases,
there are other open possibilities save for the system going directly from a
release phase to a conservation phase.89
What is the relation between identity and the phases at work in resil-
ience thinking? Is the identity of the ecosystem what happens only in the
conservation phase, when it is most rigid? Or is it the moment when it all
falls apart during the release phase? What is the relation of the constant
change at work in the ecosystem to identity? Is there a priority of dif-
ference here? Such a priority is dubious and introduces the philosophical
and reversible dyad of identity and difference into ecology. For if there
were a priority of difference over identity at work in resilience thinking,
how would the ecologist study the phases as such? The answer is that the
identity of the ecosystem is separated from the phases that it manifests or
that are “cloned” from the ecosystem. We can call the phases a clone of the
ecosystem because at its radical immanence the ecosystem is simple and
inconsistent (meaning diverse in act). For the ecosystem is the exchange of
the material and energy from the dead and the never-living to the living.
That remains regardless of the phase the ecosystem manifests. Even when
there is no stable equilibrium or if the equilibrium is rigid the ecosystem
nevertheless = One. What resilience thinking then shows is that, while

there is no equilibrium or balance in nature, there is a certain organiza-
tion to the changing dynamics of an ecosystem. This gives the ecosys-
tem an identity without requiring that this identity be anything like a
stable, harmonious whole. Rather the standard philosophical and theologi-
cal notions of identity are challenged here and it gives rise to something
altogether more in line with the non-philosophical conception of identity.
Again, this isn’t to shore up non-philosophy’s concepts, but to show where
non-philosophy has already been mutating standard philosophical concep-
tions by way of a scientific posture.
Chapter 10
Ecologies without Nature
In the previous section we traced six principles and concepts from ecology
that, when unified with philosophical theology, can change our under-
standing of nature and help us to furnish a new theory of nature. But
before we offer that theory of nature we must first deal with a two poten-
tial challenges to the project of a theory of nature formed from a unified
theory of philosophical theology and ecology. For there is another option
for philosophers than this notion of nature given from the impossibility of
foundation: one may simply reject nature altogether. Timothy Morton and
Bruno Latour have offered the strongest philosophical arguments against
the validity of the concept of nature in relation to ecology and so their
criticisms must be responded to. Ultimately I will argue that while ecology
as a science may not require the philosophical concept of nature to func-
tion, nature is still a “good name” (as Derrida said of God). The reason
nature remains a good name is, in part, because of its ability to confound
philosophical thinking, but there is always the risk that this confusion be
wielded as a weapon against human beings and other creatures. Morton
and Latour, in similar ways, attempt to decommission the weaponized form
of Nature. Nature is written here with the capital N to mean a metaphysi-
cal conception of nature, as transcendent in philosophy, but I will keep the
use of the alternating use of a capital N and lowercase n to a minimum.
So, my response to Morton’s and Latour’s criticisms will not be an outright
rejection but, in true non-philosophical style, an attempt to radicalize their
criticisms, to make them immanent, to a conception of nature for creatures
but against the World created by those creatures.
Latour’s work will be the starting point, as it is, despite Latour’s promi-
nence, the weaker argument of the two. The weakness of that argument
will be developed in relation to Morton’s own argument, because Morton,
as we will see, attempts to think thought itself as ecological by way of

scientific ecology, whereas Latour attempts to think ecology merely politi-
cally by really only considering political ecology.
Latour provides for us a succinct definition that encapsulates the
philosophico-political understanding of nature that he is writing against:
Nature: Understood here not as multiple realities [ . . . ] but as an unjustified

process of unification of public life and of distribution of the capacities of
speech and representation in such a way as to make political assembly and
the convening of the collective in a Republic impossible. I am combating
three forms of nature here: the “cold and hard” nature of the primary quali-
ties, the “warm and green” nature of Naturpolitik, and finally the “red and
bloody” nature of political economics. To naturalize means not simply that
one is unduly extending the reign of Science to other domains, but that one
is paralyzing politics. Naturalization can thus be carried out on the basis of
society, morality, and so on. Once the collective has been assembled, there
is no longer any reason, by contrast, to deprive oneself of expressions of
common sense and to use the term “natural” for something that goes with-
out saying or something that is a full-fledged member of the collective.1
The entirety of Latour’s argument is sketched out in this short definition

of nature. First, he defines nature in a particularly univocal way as that
which finds expression in three other modes of nature. This understand-
ing of nature is tied up intimately with a certain understanding of Science,
which when capitalized refers to “the politicization of the sciences” and
is opposed to the sciences, which are vital to the Republic in their plural-
ity.2 Against this vision of Nature and Science (again with the capitals
intended) Latour poses the Republic. However, Latour’s conception of the
Republic is not purely human, but instead refers to the collective of “pub-
lic things,” human and nonhuman, that are given a certain “due process”
under a new form of Constitution.3
Of course these two concepts do not carry their usual meaning either.
For due process is subtracted from its purely legal meaning and extended
to nonhuman things as well. Here the concept of the Republic really
determines the meaning of due process, because Latour plays on the
underlying Latin meanings of the two roots in Republic—res publica or
“public things.”4 In Latour’s recasting of political ecology without nature
he conceives of a new form of government that recognizes the ecological
connections between things, connections that require that we give “due
process” to understanding nonhuman things from a democratic perspec-
tive. Due process is then simply “taking the time” to understand those
relations, with all the difficulties of debates and attempts at persuasion that
come with parliamentary democracy.5
Ecologies without Nature 159
This form of democracy too must be changed by way of political

ecology without nature; for the current “constitution” was based on a
two-house collective that posited a single “Nature” and multiple societies.
These two houses are taken to be political assemblies: one an assembly of
things and the other an assembly of humans.6 Latour makes an interest-
ing insight into this model of politics, pointing out that it is based on a
double split. The obvious split is between nature and society, but there is
also a split within society between those who are supposed to know, the
“Philosopher-Scientist” who is able to leave “the Cave” and then bring back
knowledge to those who remain in the Cave, those who practice science,
and those who then decide what actions to perform on the world of nature
represented by the Philosopher-Scientist.7 In distinction to this regime the
Republic of the collective removes the determination of Nature and society
and places them relative to a single Republic (keeping in mind Latour’s
particular meaning) already existing out of the Cave that is constantly in
the process of exploration or due process.
So, why is Latour rejecting nature here? “Because nature is not a partic-
ular sphere of reality but the result of a political division, of a Constitution
that separates what is objective and indisputable from what is subjective
and disputable.”8 His construction of an alternative “Constitution” is often
strong and his own project marks a kind of “democracy of thought” that
would seem to agree with the non-philosophical vision. The differences
between Laruelle and Latour are, despite all of this, rather stark. A full
elaboration of those differences is outside the remit of this work, albeit
perhaps needed, as both are major French thinkers interested in bring-
ing science and philosophy together in radical ways at a time when that
position was unpopular in radical philosophy circles. Rather I am going
to focus on a criticism of Latour not directly located to the difference
between his work and that of Laruelle, but related instead to the overde-
termination of his thought by “the Political.” I am following Latour here
in capitalizing the Political to refer to his metaphysicalization of politics
that determines his conception of political ecology without nature. For
the problem with Latour’s “thoughtful democracy” (in opposition to a
democracy (of) thought) is that it is overdetermined by way of parliamen-
tarianism. Latour casts this idea as original, as if a “parliament of things”
marks a real turning point in the relationship between humans and non-
human things. Yet, though less intentionally developed than Latour’s “new
Constitution,” we do find traces of this open, nonmodern approach in
the past of environmental history, where societies did not have a “dou-
ble split” between nature/culture and those-who-know/those-who-do. As
Joachim Radkau has argued in his Nature and Power: A Global History
of the Environment (2008) the various forms of this already existing tacit
ecological knowledge has a mixed record in terms of fostering sustainable

human/nonhuman-coupled ecosystems.9
If such a Latourian Republic, governed by a parliament of things, is
already at question in those forms that have already existed, then it is wholly
philosophical in genre and thus specular rather than a form of thought that
escapes philosophical boundaries. In short, Latour’s own interesting con-
ception of political ecology still practices philosophical subsumption by
requiring that ecology subsume itself within what he calls a “political epis-
temology.” While his criticism of Nature is instructive, it is instructive from
a philosophical rather than ecological perspective. Latour’s political ecol-
ogy without nature is also, in terms of the structure of its thought, without
ecology. It does not allow the scientific practice of ecology to challenge the
philosophical “parliament of thought” he proposes. Furthermore, while we
may have left the prison of the Cave, Latour still requires a policing and
one that may be more insidious and more intense. By casting lived reality
in the mold of a parliament Latour binds thought to another authority,
even while he claims he is opening up both philosophy and the sciences to
the greater reality beyond the usual authorities of thought. But he does so
without challenging the underlying authority of capital itself.
In distinction to this Timothy Morton identifies capitalism in a way
that brings to mind Deleuze and Guattari’s “disjunctive synthesis” as a
negative form of ecology. He writes, “Capitalism has brought all life
forms together, if only in the negative. The ground under our feet is being
changed forever, along with the water and air.”10 Morton’s investigation
is more explicitly historical in its analysis of nature and so he is able to
show how the conception of nature operative in romantic environmental-
ism is connected intimately to capitalism.11 By not confronting the reality
of capitalism Latour allows it to remain in the background of the Republic
becoming a new kind of “environment,” a new kind of nature about which
one can only say “it’s like that.” By this “it’s like that” I am thinking here
of what Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau portmanteau of the phrase
c’est comme ça as the sékommça operative in political naturalism, which will
become more important in part IV.12 Latour’s argument against nature
falls short on a number of levels then. First, it fails to address capitalism,
which like nature also is an “unjustified process of unification of pub-
lic life,” and so even if it succeeds in creating a political ecology without
nature, it does so by creating a political ecology embedded within capital-
ism. Second, despite Latour’s work in science studies, the form of ecology
worked with is always “political ecology.” The sciences are abstracted so
far away from the authority of Science that scientific ecology is given no
particular ability to challenge philosophical thought, even as the political
model of parliamentarianism is.
This being the case Latour’s argument against the idea of nature
does not really touch on the specific question at issue here—that of the
relationship between the idea of nature and ecology—even if he is right
to criticize the standard philosophical form of nature. Morton’s argument
though is concerned more explicitly with a kind of “unified ecology”
that he calls “the ecological thought.”13 His theorization of the ecological
thought, which he says “is a virus that infects all other areas of thinking,”
engages specifically with concepts from scientific ecology while still argu-
ing for a kind of political ecology at the same time.14 So, his attempt to cast
an ecology without nature must then bear on our attempt to recast nature
non-philosophically and thus requires a response.
What does Morton mean by nature? Morton shares Latour’s criticism
of modernity as the site where the representatives of Science (as opposed
to the sciences) rely on a certain idea of Nature to stop thinking: “[I]n
general the scientisms of current ideology owe less to intrinsically sceptical
scientific practice, and more to ideas of nature, which set people’s hearts
beating and stop the thinking process, the one of saying ‘no’ to what you
just came up with.”15 Nature then operates in a similar way to the usual
philosophical transcendental authorities that are treated as simple mate-
rial in non-philosophy, and there is much to be sympathetic with from a
non-philosophical perspective when Morton identifies nature as that tran-
scendental object of nature that takes the environment and turns it into
a fetish object.16 Or, perhaps especially, when Morton identifies (though
with little elaboration) that there is a deep connection between environ-
mental thinkers such as Aldo Leopold, who certainly remains beholden to
a transcendental idea of nature as underlying structure and often positing
a divide between humans and nature (however minimal it may be), and
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “new and improved” conception of
nature.17
This criticism remains philosophical and so not entirely a challenge to
our proposed rethinking of nature non-philosophically arising from an
immanental ecology (or unified theory of ecology and philosophy). Yet,
Morton goes beyond Latour because he tries to conceive of ecology with-
out nature, or rather takes it that, in its actual practice, ecology already
operates without the philosophical conception of nature: “Why ‘ecology
without nature’? ‘Nature’ fails to serve ecology well. I shall sometimes use
a capital N to highlight its ‘unnatural’ qualities, namely (but not limited
to), hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery. Ecology
can do without a concept of something, a thing of some kind, ‘over yon-
der,’ called Nature.”18 In short, with regard to ecology and the ecologi-
cal thought that spills over science to infect all forms of contemporary
thinking, “nature” is a bad name. It is a bad name for Morton precisely
because “nature is often wheeled out to adjudicate between what is fleeting

and what is substantial and permanent. Nature smoothes over uneven his-
tory, making its struggles and sufferings illegible.”19 In this way the idea of
nature covers over the truth of the flux of living beings and provides a kind
of anchor of meaning that the monotheistic God once provided—nature is
a kind of Big Other in the Lacanian sense.20
At a deeper level, though Morton does not explicitly identify this,
nature is a bad name because it isn’t infected by the ecological thought.
In a sense Morton leaves nature forsaken by the ecological thought; as a
secularized form of God, nature may be crucified in Morton’s mesh, but it
is not resurrected and as such it is only murdered. This quasi-theological
description is not an unduly foreign element being forced on Morton’s
ideas, but rather exploits his own aligning of his ecology without nature
with Derrida’s attempt to radicalize negative theology’s “without” [sans]:
“Derrida’s profound thinking on the ‘without,’ the sans, in his writing on
negative theology comes to mind. Deconstruction goes beyond just saying
that something exists, even in a ‘hyperessential’ way beyond being. And
it goes beyond saying that things do exist. ‘Ecology without nature’ is a
relentless questioning of essence, rather than some special new thing.”21
This quasi-theological negation of nature will be important to our own
project, but insofar as Morton uses this negation to cut off nature from
redemption, it is only half-theological or is not radically theological. Will
Morton’s proclamation of the “death of nature” not require a madman
to proclaim that this death was really a murder and to ask how we are to
become worthy of it?
Morton’s casting of nature as forsaken suggests an ethical failure on
the very terms laid out in The Ecological Thought (2010). For, in terms we
will make clearer later in this chapter, while there is certainly extinction
within thought, nature is not yet dead. Even if, within scientific and philo-
sophical discourses, the essentialist conception of nature is finally passing
away, Morton rightly locates a number of other forms of nature (which he
mockingly calls “new and improved”) that are still operative in thought.
Morton’s own interesting discussion of the ethical basis for an ecological
awareness without nature suggests that we are responsible for the biosphere
“simply because we are sentient. No more elaborate reason is required.”22 As
a kind of ethical form of gnosis Morton’s suggestion is powerful. At the level
of lived immanence there is no formal creation of ethical responsibility, as
if structured by law, but the coexistence with others simply requires care,
regardless of our own personal place in terms of causation. If this is the case,
ideas too require care, as they too are something damaged or at risk: “One
of the things that modern society has damaged, along with ecosystems and
species and the global climate, is thinking.”23 By declaring nature as such

a bad name Morton is advocating a kind of “cowboy ecology” of thought.
He is actively treating the idea of nature as a varmint, suggesting that it be
actively destroyed without considering its place in the ecosystem or its resil-
ience as a population (of) thought active in that ecosystem.24
Nature is still important for thinking, specifically philosophical and
theological thinking, and especially thinking in light of the environmen-
tal crisis. But it is important to rethink nature from within “the mesh”
and the ecological thought or, in our terms, from an immanental ecology.
From this perspective it isn’t that ecology needs nature or that ecology
should think from nature, but that nature needs ecology even as nature is
a kind of “under-determination” of ecology. So ecology without nature, by
all means, but by way of nature with ecology.
Conclusion
What is the status of the old divisions of thought after the work carried
out over the past three chapters? Theology has still not been returned as
the queen of the sciences. Science can still operate with relative ease with-
out the need of worrying about the transcendental conditions for their
thought. Philosophy still is but one way of thinking alongside a plurality.
In a certain way immanental ecology does not undermine the reality of
the divisions of thought at all, for these divisions were always contingent
forms of the organization of thinking. Immanental ecology, as a form
of the non-philosophical practice of theory, simply allows us to see that
the old divisions of thought were never true divisions. That the relative
identities we can bestow on philosophy or theology is always a matter of
tendency, a tendency in the light of the radical identity of the Real-One.
In-the-last-instance ethics, theology, philosophy, ontology, God, man,
creatures, and all of creation are One. Their identity is but an effect of
the radical immanence of the One, as the radical immanence of the lived.
These divisions of thought are only useful when they are useful. This tau-
tologous statement is not meaningless, but rather it points to the material
basis of thinking about thought. If a division of thought is productive of
thought, then divide, but if the division blocks thinking, then step back
from your fabulation and refabulate from the experience of thinking itself
rather than from a hallucination of its image.
It is worth noting again Laruelle’s notion of “under-determination” in
order to understand the status of these different regions of thought or, as
they take themselves to be, these different regimes of thought. Laruelle

writes:
The fusion “under (captial-S) science” [sous (la) science] indicates an

inequality of forces and status, the “under” no longer means a domina-
tion or even an overdetermination like in the works of Marx concerning
the relations of production, but an immanent under-determination of the
philosophical subject by science, no longer a return of science on itself with
the risk of specularity, but a superposition marked by a line of definitive
contingency.25
In more familiar terminology, the vision of the division of science and phi-
losophy/theology at play here is one where the two unequal forces of think-
ing are brought together into a single, new thought. The formalism for
superposition or idempotence can be expressed as 1 + 1 = 1. For Laruelle
the different forces of thoughts are like quantum waves that can meet and
form, not a combination of the two waves, but an actual new wave where
there are three distinct identities now. We’re suggesting a similar image of
thought where the forces of thought are being treated as ecosystems. The
elements of these ecosystems are brought together, not in a combination,
but as a new ecosystem of thinking.
In part IV, I will propose a theory of nature from the perspective of a
unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology that will begin to use
this immanental ecology. I will engage with a number of different ecologies
(of) thought, separating out species and weakening their self-sufficiency by
placing them within wider spatial and temporal scales. The desire is that
by doing this we will not only treat these ecosystems (of) thought as simple
material, but will do so as ecological material with the intention of deriving
a theory of nature that is immanent to that material and can be adequately
called a first name for the Real and finally what such an adequacy might
mean. While the next section arises out of this immanental ecology it does
so insofar as I am now able to treat philosophical and theological con-
ceptions of nature as an ecological material. What this means is that I
can separate out the different uses of the concept of nature as manifest-
ing a particular functional form of nature as ultimately perverse. Thus
for Aquinas nature is presented as creation or creatural, for Spinoza there
is a chimera of God or Nature, and for Abu Ya’qûb al-Sijistânî and Naīr
al-Dīn ūsī there is recognition of the fundamental Oneness of nature
prior to Being or Alterity.
Part IV
A Theory of Nature
Chapter 11
Separating Nature from the World
Introduction
In this final part I will turn my attention to developing a theory of nature

using the methods of non-philosophy in the form I have given it in this
work, that is, as a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology.
This theory of nature will be pursued and developed by way of philo-
sophical and theological material “under-determined” by the immanental
ecology sketched out in the last chapter. I follow ecology here insofar as
I am able to avoid the need to talk about some hypostasized thing called
“Nature.” Rather nature here comes to be a particular name that is pro-
ductive of thinking or, as Laruelle would say, a force (of) thought. This
productivity would be an effect of a conception of nature that is but a
name. A non-thetic transcendence that is but a manifestation, as a first
name, of the radical immanence of the Real. The point is not, then, a the-
ory of nature within a kind of naturalism developed from ecology rather
than from empiricism, but a form of nature that breaks with these sorts
of philosophical and theological humiliations of the creatural and instead
becomes something of use to creatures. As we said in the last chapter, ecol-
ogy without nature, by all means, but by way of nature with ecology. By
way of a theory of nature that breaks with the circle of Narcissus and Echo
present in philosophy and theology by introducing the posture of scientific
ecology into philosophical theology. Such a break, which begins with the
perversity of nature, aims to think nature as irreducible to an idealized
matter (i.e., materialism) nor reducible to a transcendental idea that forms
matter (i.e., naturalism).
The chapter begins by explaining in more detail the approach to the

history of philosophy and theology present here. It then turns to the domi-
nance of the metaphysical concept of World that is present in most phi-
losophies of nature. I illustrate this dominance by way first of Heidegger
and then of Badiou; two figures chosen for their relative distance from
one another and in the hope that this distance yet structural homology
with regard to nature will illustrate what I take to be an invariant worldli-
ness at work. I then turn again to Heidegger and his conception of the
fourfold, because of Heidegger’s great influence on environmental thought
and philosophy and theology more generally. Thus his thought will work
as a kind of index for those thinkers who build off this same metaphysical
dominance of World. I take the fourfold as a sketch of a formalist con-
ception of the World taken to be nature in philosophies of nature, where
nature is but a thing that is known ultimately through various relations it
has within a World. I then unilateralize this fourfold in order to derive a
different identity of nature beyond the being of a thing. This unilateraliza-
tion is then explained further by way of a creative ecological recasting of
the debate between Thomistic ecosystems (of) thought (i.e., theologies of
analogy) and Spinozist ones (i.e., philosophies of immanence). This will
bring to the fore the constant connection in the history of thought between
thinking God and Nature. Finally, I will draw upon Islamic Ismaili thinks
al-Sijistânî and al-Dīn ūsī to short-circuit the aporia between Spinoza
and Thomas by way of a very different form of apophatic thought, from
the radical transcendence of the One beyond Being and Alterity, at work
there. I will end by disempowering this transcendence through Laruelle’s
conception of non-thetic transcendence in order to finally produce a
thought nature (a nature that is thought and productive of thought at the
same time). This recasting of each thinker takes them as simple materials
where the conception of nature at work can be shown to be “at work” and
thus not a reified nature, but rather a manifestation of nature as a thought
at work in a wider ecology. This allows me to end with a theory of nature
that locates from these three readings three different functions of nature
within the single name. In this way a theory of nature produced by this
unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology allows nature to take
leave from the Nature of naturalism.
An Ecological Reading of the History of Thought
All that was covered in the preceding chapter bears on a new practice
of reading the histories of philosophy and theology. Such a practice of
Separating Nature from the World 169
reading is ecological. Of course there does exist a form of literary criticism

that calls itself ecological, but this practice is not the same as the one I am
proposing here. For in ecological literary criticism the critic reads certain
environmental themes at work within the literature or traces its impact on
environmental and ecological thinking. All of which can be useful and
interesting and the point of differentiating the two readings is not antago-
nistic but simply to point out that this practice remains very different from
our proposal. For, while there may be something interesting in tracing cer-
tain ecological or ecologically friendly themes in Maximus the Confessor
or Immanuel Kant (to pick but two random examples), the gambit of our
proposal rests on the idea that there is a more radical ecological way of read-
ing the history of thought. Of course, to summarize what I have already
argued, the point is that thought is an ecological process. While I’m not
proposing a law here, I do take it that this idea is true with regard to some-
thing like what is normally referred to as an “empirical claim.” That is,
though I’m not doing this in any great detail here, thought could be traced
in terms of ecosystem functioning at the empirical level. Clearly human
beings are ecologically active, constrained by ecological limits, pushing
both against those limits and running past them at times, determining the
options for how their lives are affected and affect the wider ecosystem and
biosphere. To make this claim is not to say that thought is somehow more
important than anything else; if an ecologist were to study this idea she
may find that it has a weak niche or a weak place in the ecosystem. This
would not, however, change the claim, for plenty of species are able to be
placed within their nested system without the scientist being required to
make a value judgment on that species’ place in the ecosystem. It is worth
noting that in Chicago there is a research group of ecologists and social
scientists well funded by the National Science Foundation who are under-
taking the first project of its kind to trace “coupled natural and human
systems” in the city. The goal of the project, entitled “Coupled Natural
Human Systems in the Chicago Wilderness: Evaluating the Biodiversity
and Social Outcomes of Different Models of Restoration Planning,” is in
part to look at the way different social and economic groups in Chicago
have different relationships with their ecosystem.
But I am not just appealing to a scientific research project to shore up
my claims by giving it some empirical validity. This would assume already
a kind of philosophy of science, one where philosophy claims to come along
and explain the science we have separated from the transcendental con-
ditions for thought while also calling on the empirical to shore up our
claims about those transcendental conditions. The claim of an ecology
(of) thought is a claim about the radically immanent character of ecology
and thought: ecology as a science and thought as a generic practice that
takes place in a variety of ways. Ecology as a way of thinking that takes the
posture of thinking from the Real or from a perspective prior and disinter-
ested in the transcendence of Being and Alterity. So what do these claims
do? What does this theory add? They model thought ecologically and this
then makes certain illusions of the Principles of Sufficient Philosophy
and Theology more difficult to hold as well as those illusions of what we
could term the Principle of Sufficient Ecology, for it shows that a thought
that has finished thinking ecologically would be impossible. Thought is
understood not outside ecological practices, but as part and parcel of them.
There is a drive to deal with the ecological crisis by way of something
called ecological awareness, but this seems all too often to remain unaware
of its actual ecological complexity as a drive toward ecological awareness.
Thus, the claim at work here is not something I aim to prove as such.
So, while I suspect that one could do the analysis of thought and ideas in
the way I’m suggesting, I’m not trying to undertake such a purely scien-
tific inquiry. Rather my unified theory of philosophical theology and ecol-
ogy is directed in this instance toward the philosophical and theological
ideas of nature, to bring them back from the circularity of their faith and
self-sufficiency and show that they are but simple materials. Not “mere”
materials, for as material they are still powerful, but that as materials they
can be used to construct a theory of nature that is both philosophical/theo-
logical and ecological. A theory that does not aim to master nature, but to
show how nature can function in thought in different ways.
To see how a certain population (of) thought or exchange of energy can
happen consider the common practice in both philosophy and theology of
producing “readings” of other thinkers. Many scholars make their careers
on offering some kind of reading of a historical thinker that allows the
rest of us to read that figure differently than we were able to before theirs.
What happens there ecologically? As already stated, we will not aim to pro-
vide the usual history of philosophy, because we can locate the common
practice in philosophy and theology of producing readings as an ecologi-
cal process. For the reading is the extension of a kind of ecosystem (of)
thought to another locality. The particular shape of that ecosystem will be
different, but its general form will be identifiable. So, for example, the wars
that rage between various forms of Thomisms is not of particular interest
here. While some readings will obviously be wrong in some uninteresting
way, say based on some error of translation or something in the same reg-
ister, the dominant forms are still populated by populations (of) thought
that find their original organization in the thought of Thomas himself.
At a simple level, the different ecological forms of Thomism exist because
they work, because they can create some niche. In what follows here I will
call this creation of a niche “piety.” Piety should here be understood as an
ecological conception, but only since there is no absolute division between

the realm of the natural world and the realm of religion. Both are in eco-
logical process in a way that changes the fundamental meaning of both
terms.
Consider then one of the aspects of Aquinas’s thought that has been
recovered by contemporary theologians in all denominations: the concept of
the analogia entis. Contemporary Christian theologians tell us magnificent
things about the analogia entis such that one could easily come to think it is
the key to Aquinas’s whole way of thinking. But such an understanding of
the analogia entis removes it from the processes of thought that produced
it. It presents the analogia entis not as technology or a method of intuition
that may lead to knowledge and experience, but as a tool of the intellect to
be wielded in the demolition of other processes of thought or the intellec-
tual construction of social and political projects.1 Such a use of the analo-
gia entis has been common since Pope Leo XII’s encyclical “Aeterni Patris”
made Aquinas’s theological system normative for all theological training.
Such a use of Aquinas turns his concepts into truncheons that the police,
as theologian Mark D. Jordan terms them, then used against those who
challenge their authority.2 These “police” are more than simply academic
bullies parading the halls of theology and religious studies departments,
for they are also the court intellectuals for a kind of soft (though deadly)
authoritarianism on the rise in Europe and North America. And of course
it cannot be denied that the thought of Aquinas has been used to support a
great number of repressive, authoritarian regimes throughout the Catholic
world, by reinforcing reactionary doxa and instilling these regimes with a
sense of divine mission.
Yet Jordan has sought to uncover a relatively “unknown Aquinas”
that challenged the dominant forms of authority.3 Jordan unearths this
unknown Aquinas through a clear method of situating, in increasing,
intricacy, Aquinas’s historical position. Yet, what this really reveals is
Aquinas’s piety. Piety is here understood in the sense given it by Philip
Goodchild: “We shall call ‘piety’ any determinate practice of directing
attention.”4 Piety is the way in which the thinker disciplines their atten-
tion, rather than allowing it to be captured. Piety is then an act of liberty
on the part of the thinker that shapes the experiences and networks of
interdependence that are located at the genesis of the thought. For Aquinas
the experiences and networks of interdependence are relatively well-known
by his readers.5 According to the custom of his time Aquinas was destined
for a life of service to the Catholic Church, as he was the youngest child of
his family. His relatively comfortable family hoped that he would become
a successful abbot of the local monastery. Aquinas, to the chagrin and
sometimes physical protest of his family, pursued a far more humble life
as a mendicant friar in the Dominican Order of Preachers.6 Here both his

impressive intelligence and desire to serve as Christ had served were given
equal opportunity for satisfaction. Aquinas appears to have been very con-
cerned with the concrete realities facing human beings in a time of intense
strife and peril as Torrell remarks on Aquinas’s sermons: “For an intel-
lectual, Thomas’s preaching appears astonishingly concrete, supported by
daily experience, concerned with social and economic justice.” 7
The concreteness of Aquinas’s thought was surpassed by his intense
aptitude for abstract thought. Under the guidance of Albertus Magnus he
made an intense study of the Christian scriptures as well as the main theo-
logical manuals of the time, but he was also exposed to the work of Islamic
theology and philosophy and the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.
This aptitude and appetite for learning led to positions, both at relatively
young ages, as a bachelor and later as a master at the University of Paris.
There he entered into bitter political debates with the secular members of
the university over the right of the mendicants to teach. At the same time
his tolerance and qualified admiration for the work of Aristotle often led to
conflicts with other members of the Faculty of Theology at the University
of Paris. Thus at any one time Aquinas’s attention was given to abstract
metaphysical debates about God and the World, the concrete defense of
the mendicants’ religious way of life, and the political realities of a time in
great conflict, both inside the church and between the church and varied
kingdoms of European Christendom.8
This short sketch serves to give an indication of the experiences and
networks of interdependence that conditioned the generation of Aquinas’s
thought. His act of liberty in the midst of these constraining conditions
was to focus his attention on speaking truthfully about God and creatures.
This means speaking about God in such a way that God is not made into
a mere object of human thought, but to speak of God in such a way that
his transcendence is respected while also faithfully speaking of God in the
indirect and negative ways available to all human persons as natural and
rational creatures. It also means speaking about creatures and raising them
to the dignity that their existence as creatures made in the image of God
speaks to, as well as their possibility of becoming divine as Sons of God. The
crystal of piety through which Aquinas was able to unconsciously direct his
attention was his doctrine of analogy, specifically the transcendental doc-
trine of the analogia entis. In Aquinas’s writings the analogia entis appears
as a creative line of escape out of certain problems that arise from the inner
contradiction of Latin theology’s positivist will to truth and its demand for
orthodoxy. Which is to say that while the natural philosophy of Aristotle
was to be pursued for the truth that rightly belongs to God, as a pagan
philosophy it had to be completed by being rethought in Christian dogma.
Aquinas was able to unravel this contradiction by recourse to the analogia

entis for the analogia entis secures for him the diversity and multiplicity of
beings in the natural world without forfeiting, at the theological level, the
perfection of God’s ipsum esse.9 The analogia entis allows Aquinas to secure
the radical otherness of God, or God’s radical perfection above creatures,
without thereby making God unknowable. As Bernard Montagnes writes,
“Too close, God ceases to be transcendent; too far, He vanishes into an
inaccessible transcendence. In one case He is no longer God; in the other
He is no longer real.”10 Thus the analogia entis is a process of thought that
arises and is able to be productive within a certain ecosystem, but as an
ecological process it also by definition has limits.
Or, to take another example, consider the philosophy of Spinoza and
the recent revival of his thought in Continental philosophy. The focus of
the French and Italian philosophers has been on the conatus. Their read-
ing of Spinoza has hinged on proliferating this population (of) thought in
their own work, expanding its niche arguably past the limits we find it has
in Spinoza’s own. For Spinoza, the conatus was a population (of) thought
that operated but was checked by its coming up against the dominant
question of form that determined philosophical thinking at that time. So,
for Spinoza, the conatus may well have been predominately a population
(of) thought in relation to the population (of) thought of the human being
(or Spinoza’s conception of the human being in more standard terminol-
ogy), whereas the twentieth-century neo-Spinozists extended conatus to
all things in an intensive way. Spinoza was, of course, excommunicated
from the Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of 24 in 1656 and his
Theological-Political Treatise was banned in the Dutch Republic shortly
after its publication due to the pressure exerted on the De Witt govern-
ment by the Reformed population.11 This was due largely to the perceived
impiety of the book and, indeed, it was (and continues to be) hostile to the
dominant pieties that reigned in Europe at the time. These pieties allowed
people to war against one another in the name of religion, to persecute men
of learning who doggedly pursued the truth of reality without the proper
deference to the perceived true cosmology of the Christian scriptures, and
ultimately this piety led to the Ultami barbarorum that Spinoza witnessed
and protested against when an Orangist mob killed and mutilated the
recently deposed De Witt brothers.
But, as the standard tales about Spinoza tell us, does this not mean that
Spinoza himself actually lacked piety? Following again the philosophical
conception of piety that Goodchild gives this word, we can actually see that
the perceived impiety of Spinoza was itself an accident of a more funda-
mental piety. The intentional direction of attention that allowed Spinoza to
escape capture by the myriad experiences and networks of interdependence
within which his life and thought were productive. I will begin by follow-
ing Goodchild’s own analysis of Spinoza’s piety. Goodchild begins that
analysis by quoting from the Theological-Political Treatise where Spinoza
locates “the following manifestation of Hebrew piety” writing:
And here at the outset we must note that the Jews never specify intermedi-
ate or particular causes and take no notice of them, but owing to religion
and piety, or (in the common phrase) “for devotion’s sake,” refer everything
back to God. For example, if they have made some money by a business
transaction, they say that God has stirred their heart; and if they think of
something, they say that God has said it to them.12
Goodchild connects this location of a Hebrew piety by Spinoza to a

Calvinist piety by way of resemblance: “By taking this Calvinist piety to
its logical extreme, attributing all that happens to God, Spinoza is able to
identity God with nature. [ . . . ] Spinoza’s method of immanent critique
is clear: he began from the ultimate principle, the Word or mind of God,
and attributed to it all the properties required by piety, including unity,
universality and infinite power.”13 In a similar way to that which Aquinas
developed analogy Spinoza developed the thinking of Deus sive Natura.
Spinoza accepted the dominant pieties of his age by working with them as
material to direct attention. They differ in that Spinoza radically took that
dominant piety to its conclusion. Or, stated differently, Spinoza’s prac-
tice of piety is precisely different from that of Aquinas’s in that Spinoza’s
practice of piety effectuates the beginning of the critique of piety by piety
itself. Goodchild characterizes it this way, “Benedict (formerly Baruch) de
Spinoza, writing at the cusp of modernity, pioneered a method of imma-
nent critique through a cynical equivocation: deus sive natura.”14
Now, as with the debates in Thomism, I am not interested in whether or
not this was Spinoza’s intention or even if it is the “best” or “most creative”
reading of Spinoza. On the basis of the second axiom of non-theology the
Real is foreclosed to tradition and authority and thus Spinoza is subject to
the Real rather than his philosophy uniquely disclosing it. His philosophy
can be revealing of occasions and even help us to work out axioms con-
cerning how to think from the Real, but it is material rather than divine
decree. The same is true for the other thinkers engaged with here, includ-
ing Laruelle whose work nevertheless remains of the utmost importance
because of his revealing this structure. Laruelle’s work is prized as a par-
ticularly useful method and revealing of such structures, rather than treat-
ing Laruelle the man as an oracle.
Of course any expert in Aquinas, Spinoza, Ismaili thought, or any of
the other thinkers engaged with in this concluding part may challenge
our use of these figures, but that expert cannot challenge that use on the
basis of a reading. I’m treating each figure minimally as a generic name for
particular ecosystems (of) thought. Obviously this does not absolve me of
scholarly rigor, which I hope the citational apparatus will witness to, but it
does free this work as non-philosophy to experiment with their thoughts
for a project that is more concerned with a disempowering of the specular
culture of reading in the service of the creation of a theory of nature. Not a
reading of nature as Aquinas or Spinoza or al-Sijistânî understood nature,
but a theory of nature derived from philosophies and theologies as imma-
nent ecological material.
The Dominance of the World
To begin, following our path of a non-philosophical immanental ecology I

will consider a particular ecophilosophy that has become a dominant spe-
cies within the wider ecosystem (of) thought that is Continental environ-
mental philosophy and environmental theology. Within both these fields
there has been a focus on the holistic understanding of nature, the idea
that there is a single all-encompassing whole, a meaningful whole, of the
ecological being-with of the planet. This idea could be rooted in ecological
science, as there is a continuum of ecosystems that includes, as discussed
in part III, the biosphere. In simple terms, the biosphere is the name for
the world ecosystem that contains all living animals and plants and the ele-
ments necessary for the possibility of life.15 The idea, though, of a certain
being-with of the whole was popularized by various new religious move-
ments (commonly referred to as the New Age movement) and some theolo-
gians within traditional religious groups who, with particular enthusiasm,
took to James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis.” Subsequently scientific ecolo-
gists felt at first that there was something amiss in Lovelock’s hypothesis,
but even though they eventually came to accept aspects of the theory they
still felt that the term “Gaia” was corrupted and so they opted for the
term “geophysiology.” Lovelock’s idea was essentially an updated version of
the early ecological theories of Clements, also discussed in part III, where
the earth is understood as a superorganism.16 Lovelock’s hypothesis is just
that, a hypothesis, and as such it is ultimately a heuristic concept that has
allowed for interesting advances in ecology. Yet, these advances in the tech-
nical literature are rarely, if ever, of interest to the environmental philoso-
pher or theologian, bracketing for the moment any kind of judgment on
that lack of interest. Instead, the focus has been on the “holistic” element
of Lovelock’s theory. This is voiced most clearly by the environmental
theologian Anne Primavesi in her direct and sustained engagement with

the Gaia hypothesis in her book Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth
System Science (2000). There she discusses how her work “gives priority
to ecology” in the language that she deploys in her theology, writing that
“if theology is to have a positive input into the important environmental
debates of the day then theologians have to use or at least to familiarize
themselves with scientific environmental language and with its implicit
understanding that the ecosystems to which we all belong interconnect
within a greater whole.”17
What is it about this particular idea, this population (of) thought, whose
origin appears at first to be from a popular idea about what people think
ecology thinks, that allows it to thrive within the ecosystem (of) thought
that is environmental thinking (encompassing both philosophy and theol-
ogy)? The working hypothesis that guides this chapter is that there is a
metaphysical commitment that is common to both Christian theology and
European philosophy. Genealogists would trace that commitment, obsess-
ing over its genetic element, attempting to tease out the pure source of the
idea, but the immanental ecology I have already deployed means that this
genetic element is of secondary interest. The fact is that these two ecosys-
tems (of) thought share much in common, including many of the same
populations (of) thought that produce different niches within the particu-
lar ecosystem. The particular population (of) thought that dominates envi-
ronmental thought is that of the World. Primavesi locates that similarity
between theology and science defining the former as “what we say we know
about the relationship between the world and God” and the latter as “what
we say we know about the nature of the world.”18 This illustrates what I
have already said and will explain in greater detail in this chapter, which is
that there is a fundamental relationship, in different forms (dialectical, ana-
logical, univocal, etc.), between God and Nature. What the World provides
philosophy is an abstract field where God and Nature become things that
are subsumed within a transcendent form of philosophical and/or theologi-
cal thinking. The philosopher is always above the World as transcendental
ego and the theologian is always in the World, but not of it. The ambigu-
ous relationship of philosophy and theology to the World is perhaps best
captured by Marx in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The phi-
losophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, how-
ever, is to change it.”19 The World is this strange invariant and dominant
population (of) thought that takes on different functions, is implicated in
different relations of energy exchange, within the various ecosystems (of)
thought called philosophy, theology, and even science.
Heidegger himself located this primacy of World in a number of his
investigations into the nature of philosophy and so there is a kind of worldly
environmentalism to his work. Because I am claiming that this metaphysi-

cal dominance is invariant within philosophy I turn to Badiou, whose
opposition to Heidegger allows a short comparative study that shows the
varying ways that this invariant dominance of the World expresses itself in
considerations of nature.
“Poem or Matheme?”: The Worldly Amphibology
Heidegger privileges poetry as the hors-philosophical discourse that lets

Being be, that allows Being to “unveil” itself to man in his dwelling. He
writes, “The most difficult learning is coming to know actually and to the
very foundations what we already know. Such learning, with which we
are here solely concerned, demands dwelling continually on what appears
to be nearest to us, for instance, on the question of what a thing is” and
“[p]oetry is what really lets us dwell. But through what do we attain to a
dwelling place? Through building. Poetic creation, which lets us dwell,
is a kind of building.”20 Heidegger explicitly rejects any kind of think-
ing of Being in mathematics and by extension modern science generally,
claiming that “[t]he mathematical is [ . . . ] a project of thingness which,
as it were, skips over the things” and “modern science is mathematical.”21
This conception of science, according to Heidegger, infected philosophy
with Descartes and led to a thinking of the human subject, the clearing
of Being as Dasein, along mathematical, rather than “purely ontological”
grounds.22
In Heidegger’s 1929–30 lecture course, published in English translation
under the title The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, he claims that “homelessness” is “the very determination of philos-
ophy!”23 This idea is derived from the poet Novalis, the authority of which
Heidegger suggests may be suspect from a philosophical position. He goes
on to write, “Yet without provoking an argument over the authority and
significance of this witness, let us merely recall that art—which includes
poetry too—is the sister of philosophy and that all science is perhaps only a
servant with respect to philosophy.”24 Thus the homelessness that the poet
speaks of is closer to the homelessness of the philosopher, rather than the
abstraction from the home of the mathematician. Homelessness is what
calls the philosopher forth to speak about the World. What is this World?
It is the philosophical urge to “be everywhere at home” when one is not
everywhere at home. This urge to be everywhere, Heidegger says, is really
a desire to be within the whole called forth as a whole: “This ‘as a whole’ is
the world.”25 But, more importantly, there is a population (of) thought at
work here that even determines this “as a whole,” and that is the popula-
tion of “being.” For, “[t]his is where we are driven in our homesickness: to
being as a whole.”26
It is in the course of this lecture series that Heidegger touches on a
claim he makes in various other writings: that the Greek conception of
physis does not intend the same meaning as the Latin natura.27 Rather, he
claims that for the Greeks the word originally intended sense of physis was
the “self-forming prevailing of beings as a whole.”28 If the World is “as a
whole” and physis, which we translate as nature, is “self-forming prevailing
of beings as a whole,” then nature is subsumed into the notion of World.
In order to develop this notion of World Heidegger famously drew on the
German biologist Jacob von Uexküll, an early protoecological thinker, and
his theory of different Umwelts for different animals. This was an early
conception of the ecological concept of niche that has been greatly sur-
passed with the discovery of different relations and intensities that form
niches, yet the earlier conception of Umwelt has captured many philoso-
phers’ attention.29 But of course the metaphysical concept of World does
not suddenly appear in the midst of this lecture course, but is of funda-
mental importance in his 1927 Being and Time as well. There, Heidegger
shows himself to be a worldly philosopher in the construction of a philoso-
phy ultimately concerned with the worldliness of thought. This is a very
different view of his philosophy than he himself put forward, for in his
view his philosophy, like all true philosophy, was dealing with the question
of ontology, of Being qua Being or the Beingness of beings and so on. In
order to get to the discussion of Being, however, he has to pass through
the World. Dasein, a first name for human being, has to disclose itself in
a World. Heidegger, in his attempt to overturn Platonism, can not simply
think Being in the abstract, or as an Ideal subtracted from its actuality, and
so his philosophy must quickly come to terms with the World, if not with
the state of the World as horizon of Dasein, as that into which Dasein is
thrown. Incidentally, it is in this way that Heidegger’s thought, as is often
noticed, gives itself over to certain environmental concerns. Dasein, the
being of human being, does not exist separated from the wider whole of
beings, indeed Dasein is said to be in-the-World. Dasein is split between
a comportment toward its own Being and “which in each case I myself
am.”30 But what is important is not Dasein, but what grounds Dasein and
allows it to take on a “definite character” in both modes. Heidegger him-
self says, “[T]hey must be seen and understood a priori as grounded upon
that state of Being which we have called ‘Being-in-the-world.’ ”31
What this “being-in” consists of, according to Heidegger, is not a deter-
mination of Dasein, but the being-in is a state of Being of Dasein. Thus
Dasein is not “side-by-side” with the World, for Dasein is not a thing that
could be in another thing, but the World is an appearing of Daseins as a

whole.32 Thus, a nonhuman nature is completely wiped out. A sensitive
Heideggerian may insist that we say a non-Dasein nature is completely
wiped out, but it is clear from the 1929–30 lecture course that Dasein is
thought by Heidegger to be the human, hence his faulting von Uexküll for
never being “to think thorough the concept of world itself.”33 As well as
his famous separation of the human, the animal, and the stone according
to their relationship with the world, which he used to uncover the Being
of World. Here the human is world-forming, the animal is poor in world,
and the stone is worldless.34 But how is it that the human is world-forming?
By tearing away physis, through the destruction of the “as a whole,” and
dragging all of it into the light of truth: “The Greek concept of truth pre-
sented here manifests to us an intimate connection between the prevailing
of being, their concealment, and man. Man as such, insofar as he exists, in
the [logos] tears [ physis], which strives to conceal itself, from concealment
and thus brings beings to their truth.”35 Of course the sense of logos here
is not the same as found in Christian scholasticism, which connects it to
a notion of reason that Heidegger claims is enthroned in modern science,
but to a simple making manifest or revealing. There is thus a strong rela-
tionship between truth [aletheia] and logos for Heidegger.36
But what is most truthful, most revealing of Being, is the world-forming
character of poetry or poiesis, which Heidegger tells us means “making.”37
This is the thrust of Heidegger’s reflection on Hölderlin’s enigmatic say-
ing “ . . . poetically man dwells . . . ,” which captures Heidegger’s attention.
For there he writes that the poet isn’t one who suddenly “turns up” in the
midst of dwelling, but “poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling.”38 But
why is it that the World, which has come to be the name for physis and thus
subsumes what we may call nature into its worldliness, has to be subsumed
into the Being of Dasein in order to be revealed? Doesn’t this turn nature,
as the World, into a thing in the World? I will return to this question in the
next section, but first need to complete the description of this homology by
showing how it works in mathematically driven ontology as well.
Alain Badiou is perhaps the most anti-Heideggerian philosopher that
nonetheless exists within the same larger ecosystem (of) thought—philo-
sophical ontology. Both philosophers concern themselves primarily with
the question of ontology, seeing the question of Being as the primary or
underlying question for thought. Both turn to practices outside of phi-
losophy in order to answer that question, but that is precisely where the
difference between them lies. Heidegger’s ontology is explicitly poetic and
Badiou’s ontology in contrast is explicitly mathematical, “mathematics
is ontology—the science of being qua being.”39 Badiou, like Heidegger,
is correlatively concerned with the identity of philosophy, but unlike
Heidegger he does not suture philosophy to ontology alone, which is to

say to mathematics alone. For Heidegger philosophy is ambiguous in its
essence, seeming to be a proclamation of a worldview or an afterthought
of science, but also something absolute and ultimate for Dasein, for letting
“Da-sein become what it can be.”40 The identity of philosophy remains,
unlike that of science, a problem for Heidegger throughout his works,
taking different forms in different periods, sometimes even dropping the
name “philosophy” and replacing it with the name “thought,” while at
other times philosophy and metaphysics are synonymous. In short, the
problem remained for Heidegger and as a problem he dwelled with it. For
Badiou, however, philosophy is not an autonomous act, in-itself philosophy
does not exist, but is dependent upon events that happen in four different
realms, which he calls the conditions of philosophy: matheme, poetry/art,
political invention, and love.41 These conditions, which are themselves
named truth-procedures, produce the truths that philosophy thinks con-
tingently in relation to that procedure: “Philosophy pronounces, not the
truth, but the conjuncture, which is to say the thinkable conjuncture, of
truths.”42 Thus, though Badiou himself is a philosopher concerned primar-
ily with ontology (though there is a tension between the primacy of politics
or mathematics in his work) and thus with a mathematical philosophy, he
does not limit philosophy to matheme, which is to say that he does not
limit philosophy to ontology.43 Indeed, what a true philosopher must do,
says Badiou, is “propose a conceptual framework in which the contempo-
rary compossibility of these conditions can be grasped.”44
Therefore, when Badiou poses the question “Nature: Poem or
Matheme?” in Being and Event (2005) he is actually locating, within the
perspective of his philosophy, a false problem that plagued Heidegger.45
Given Badiou’s pitching his ontology against that of Heidegger’s one might
expect that he would simply reverse Heidegger’s judgment, perhaps argu-
ing that the poem conceals Being while mathematics unveils it. However,
Badiou instead proposes “not an overturning but another disposition of
these two orientations.”46 That an “authentic originary thought” occurs in
the poem is granted by Badiou, but that originary thought is not ontologi-
cal as such, it is instead a consideration of presence or appearing, which
is distinct, for Badiou, from Being qua Being. Thus we may say, follow-
ing Badiou, that Heidegger confused the philosophy of nature in suturing
that philosophy to the poem. I will leave aside the validity of Badiou’s
contention that Heidegger is wrong concerning the role of physis in Greek
philosophy, because I am unable to judge it and because it is unimportant
within this immanental approach.47 What is important within our imma-
nental approach is to locate the structure of Badiou’s thinking of nature
and from that perspective his discussion of the Greeks is a symptom of
that structure. Badiou holds that the true significance of the Greek birth
of philosophy is not poetry, for poetry is more universal and found in
prephilosophical societies (China, India, and Egypt are named), but rather
what constitutes the Greek event is the interruption of the poem with the
matheme. The poem that is interrupted is the same poem that Badiou
“willingly admits” is the site of the letting-be of appearing a letting-be
that is sutured to the “theme of nature.” Thus, by implication, the Greek
event of ontology interrupts nature as the site of appearance, untying the
“thought of Being from its poetic enchainment to natural appearing.”48
This need to find at philosophy’s origin a fundamental privileging of
Being and the matheme over nature and poetry discloses the hierarchical
structure, which is to say worldly structure, of Badiou’s philosophy. Now,
it would be misguided, especially within an ecological context, to simply
reject hierarchy, for the concept is used though not in the absolute form
found in philosophy and theology. But it remains important to note that it
is that hierarchical structure that mediates the thinking of the particular
“concept of nature,” as Badiou calls it.49 We can extrapolate from here to
a kind of formal explanation of his system of philosophy: philosophy is
conditioned by truth events that arise from one of the four domains, but
philosophy must show how the truth-event is compossible within the other
truth-procedures (thus the domain has a fundamentally double structure,
both as a world where a truth occurs and as a discourse that pronounces
that truth or makes its appearance intelligible); thus the object taken for
philosophical analysis (as analysis via the conceptual framework of com-
possibility) will manifest itself distinctly and fully within this framework
and philosophy will pronounce the conjuncture of this object. However,
it is clear from the overall form of Badiou’s work, especially in his major
philosophical books, that, though philosophy is not to be sutured to the
mathematical, it is not to take a democratic form between the conditions
either. Mathematics, and thus ontology, is thus of ultimate regard and one
can almost say, slipping into Laruelle’s conceptual vocabulary, that in the
last instance the object is mathematic.50
This is what plays out in relation to the concept of nature in his analy-
sis. Some aspect of nature remains within the truth-procedure of poetry,
though Badiou does not elaborate on what that is and his main interest
remains ontological asking, “What happens—for that part of it which
has not been entrusted to the poem—to the concept of ‘nature’ in this
configuration [ . . . ] the framework of mathematical ontology? [ . . . ] is
there a pertinent concept of nature in the doctrine of the multiple?”51 The
answer is a subtraction from the Heideggerian discussion of nature, where
nature as physis names that which comes to stand and remain standing in
itself, but this ultimately must still be translated into Badiou’s own terms
as a reciprocity between the natural and the normal: “[N]ature is what is

rigorously normal in being.”52 Badiou goes on to provide a set-theoretical
explication of nature/normal-being as ordinal number and thus nature
has been known ontologically through set-theory as “the natural.”53
Ontologically the nature of modern philosophy and science, the Nature of
Galileo written in mathematical language, does not exist, because nature as
natural-being-in-totality contradicts the axiom that forbids auto-belonging
of a set to itself (nature too would have to be a set, as this is where Being
qua Being is understood). “Nature has no sayable being. There are only
some natural beings. [ . . . ] The ontological doctrine of natural multiplici-
ties thus results, on the one hand, in the recognition of their universal
intrication, and on the other hand, in the inexistence of their Whole.”54
I propose here a creative rereading of Badiou’s metaphilosophy in relation
to the question of nature, one that is faithful to the structure of Badiou’s
thought, but that takes leave with the up to now exegetical character of this
section, now casting his philosophy from the immanental ecology. This
immanental ecology will disclose the privileged place of wholeness, and
thus the amphibology of matheme or poem within worldly thought. Begin
first with the general structure of the ecosystem, the exchange of energy
between the living, the dead, and the never-living. Such a structure is for-
mally present in Badiou’s founding axiom of his later work, which he calls,
not uncontroversially, “dialectical materialism.” The axiom of dialectical
materialism states, “There are only bodies and language; except that there
are truths.”55 It would appear then that we have three sites of exchange,
but the important difference to note is that while in ecology these three
terms are not convertible within the moment of the ecosystem (so the dead
is not yet the living and neither are they the never-living), within Badiou’s
axiom bodies and languages have a somewhat reciprocal relationship yet
truths have no such relationship: “These are incorporeal bodies, languages
devoid of meaning, unconditioned supplements. Truths exist as excep-
tions to what there is.”56 We cannot, then, simply overlay the ecosystem
concept over the top of the founding axiom, but must tease out the true
ecological elements of his thought. First, one notes that within Badiou’s
ecosystem (of) thought there are seemingly four ecosystems, which are his
truth-procedures of mathematics, art, politics, and love; however because
philosophy is the framework of the compossibilty of these conditions
we have to understand these as the dominant populations (of) thought.
Within this framework it is clear that mathematics is the dominant spe-
cies, and that all niches have some relation to this species. The exchange
of energy is concentrated here, and if the mathematical species were to
disappear the whole of network of relations would fall apart ending in a
poor diversity of thought.
So what then is the never-living condition for the continued health of

this dominant species? The only answer available is the World. This has
particular relevance for his philosophy of nature, where nature, as a popula-
tion (of) thought, can no longer function in the niche it has in Heidegger’s
ecosystem (of) thought as “being as a whole.” The niche it comes to take
in Badiou’s ecosystem (of) thought is as an incomplete Whole of whole-
ness, or the consistency of a particular multiple.57 This merely relativ-
izes as appearance, via set-theory, the maximal ontological wholeness of
Heidegger’s World, but the World is still necessarily the place, the environ-
ment, in which bodies, language, and truths appear.58 This is clear from
his definition of World: “[A] world is the place in which objects appear.”59
Nature, then, can only be understood via World within this ecosystem (of)
thought and thus, Badiou, like Heidegger, subsumes the real identity of
nature into World in a way that is structurally the same.
Unilateralizing the Fourfold
Let us return now to the question posed earlier: why is it that the World, as
the name Heidegger claims is closer to the intention of the Greeks’ mean-
ing of physis, must be subsumed into the Being of Dasein in order to be
revealed? And doesn’t this turn nature, as subsumed into the World, into
yet another thing in the World? The answer seems to me to be yes, but
there is an important corollary to this thingness of nature subsumed into
World: there is a reversibility between the World and Dasein’s Being, which
is in fact the genesis of the thingness of nature at work here. For the World
is the appearance of Being and Being is what produces the appearance
such that Heidegger’s thought continually comes to turn around these two
terms throughout his work.60 This becomes clearest, perhaps ironically,
in Heidegger’s conception of the fourfold. The potential irony arises from
the fact that, of all Heidegger’s concepts, the fourfold is the most poetic
and thus the biggest distraction for Continentalists in their attempts to
have mainstream Anglophone philosophers take seriously the work of
Heidegger. For what does it mean to say that “[t]he fouring presences as
the worlding of world”?61 Especially when that meaning is dependent upon
the “fouring” of “earth and sky, divinities and mortals”!62
Yet, while of course the fourfold is indeed strange at first glance, it still
works as a way of thinking about the presence of things. It is through this
fourfold that one who is thinking is able to presence the thingness of some
thing, to speak Heideggerian. The power, in terms of its ability to produce
thought, may become clearer if one thinks of the fourfold as a particular
population (of) thought whose niche it develops parasitically to two other

populations: World (with nature subsumed within) and Being, or “signifi-
cant appearance” and Being as such.63 What it produces, then, is a mixture
within thought of World and Being, which nature is subsumed within.
Thus, we aim to unilateralize the fourfold in order to separate out nature
from World. Precisely in order to think nature prior to Being and Alterity,
that is, nature as in-One, we need to disempower this particular popula-
tion by changing its niche, allowing nature as in-One to become separate
from “significant appearance” or World.
It is necessary to explain what the fourfold is aside from its poetic form
given it by Heidegger. First, we know that the conception of the fourfold
flows out of Heidegger’s obsession with poetry (what could be called the
space and time of his ecosystem (of) thought). It is this poetic aspect of the
conception that has likely scared off most of his commentators from deal-
ing with it, since, as mentioned earlier, it is already at odds with attempts
to translate Heidegger into more acceptable forms of philosophical think-
ing. It is unsurprising then that in English I know of only three secondary
sources that take the fourfold seriously in their reading of Heidegger’s phi-
losophy. Seriously is meant here in the sense that they use the fourfold as a
way to understand Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole and so it works as a
kind of surveying matrix arising out of his philosophy that can help orga-
nize a reading of it. These thinkers are Julian Young in an article added
to the second edition of the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (2006),
Michael Lewis’s Heidegger beyond Deconstruction: On Nature (2007) where
the fourfold is used to explain Heidegger’s philosophy of nature, and in
Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object (2011) where the fourfold is sub-
tracted from Heidegger’s phenomenology and used in the service of a phi-
losophy of objects. What is interesting is that each author, while taking the
fourfold seriously, seemingly presents a very different interpretation. Yet,
despite these differences, each author is also compelling in their reading
and supports it with an intimidating scholarly apparatus. I am ultimately
uninterested in the scholastic nature of Heidegger research necessary for
any attempt to construct a judgment on which is the best and most accurate
retelling of the fourfold. Indeed, following the non-philosophical method
I’ve been developing in this book, I am able to treat each of them as a
generic ecosystem that exhibits fourfold-like properties, simply because
each of them does work.
Each reading works because they are each pitched at different scales,
remembering that the sizes of ecosystems are always n-dimensional. Thus
for Harman the fourfold maps an object into a duel that takes place at
two levels: one of presence and absence and another of veiling and unveil-
ing.64 This is because a thing, or object in Harman’s vocabulary, is both
within the world as an individual being-as-such as well as breaking or tear-

ing apart the being-as-such by veiling being-as-a-whole.65 This zooming
into objects as such is understood at a different level by Young, where the
fourfold maps things onto the nature/culture difference. This is because
the axis of divinities and mortals has to do with the realm of culture (in
terms of values and finitude) while the axis of sky and earth has to do with
nature.66 And finally, for Lewis, the fourfold has to do with signification
of nature and thus it is a level below Young in its combining of nature and
culture within the naturally formed act of self-transcending through lan-
guage.67 These differing levels are helpful for our purposes insofar as what
Harman’s use shows is that the thing that appears within the fourfold is
a simple object in relation to other objects. This reveals something that is
more fully expressed by Lewis, as the fourfold is the presence of the thing
as signification within the World.
So what then does it mean to unilateralize this fourfold? Keeping in
mind that the fourfold is a production of thought, so the fourfold itself
is not the ground of thinking but an organization of the movement of
thought, then a unilateralization of the fourfold is simply another way
of organizing thought. If for Heidegger the fourfold is about appearance,
the unilateralization of the fourfold makes such appearance relative to its
real identity where there can be no separation between its static image
and its movement. Laruelle’s conception of unilateralization at work in
non-philosophy serves to direct thought from the One, to direct thought
toward the most radical immanent form of what is thought. Thus, in uni-
lateralizing the fourfold I hope to organize thinking in such a way as to free
a thought nature from reversibility or the dialectic of Being and Alterity.
Nature is not an other to humanity, nor is it the field of Being, but has an
identity. Heidegger’s focus on measure in “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ”
suggests that the fourfold is concerned with a kind of individuation as tak-
ing the measure of a thing. Yet, nature is perverse, it is, as One, immeasur-
able. Thus any thinking of nature must be immeasurable, without recourse
to transcendental circumscription, dialectics, or fourfolds.
While I have drawn on the works of the various commentators already
discussed in order to form my understanding of the fourfold, here I present
a different understanding of its various combinations. First, the two axes
can be interpreted ecologically. The axis of earth and sky can be thought
of as the biosphere upon which the second axis of mortals and divinities, or
death and life, is dependent yet inextricably linked. That is, the earth and
sky is a reduced duality that speaks to the fundamental level of the space of
the biosphere (earth) and the rhythm of the relationship of that space with
the energy provided by the sun alongside of other relatively transcendent
elements to the earth like climate (sky).68 This is especially clear insofar as
the earth is what is seemingly absent in its closeness, while the sky is where
the unveiling of transcendence happens. Climate becomes clear to us not
as a whole, but in our experience of weather as manifest in the unexpected
storm on the horizon or the haze of an especially hot Chicago summer
day. The second axis is the life and death that are sustained by this first
axis, yet also constitute its actuality. For the mortals are those who “are the
human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means
to be capable of death as death.”69 The divinities are those who provide the
measure of that unthinkable moment, a moment that mortals witness, but
do not experience in that witness. That is, the divinities are the measure of
this moment through their absence, which Heidegger calls their default,
which presences a hidden fullness.70 This hidden fullness is only experi-
enced because of mortal finitude, for Heidegger, because of the fact that an
individual human being is not the fullness of being.
This then creates an interesting new set of binaries that are more abstract
and that are lacking in the three commentators we’ve discussed: that of
earth and divinities and sky and mortals. For there is a deep connection
between the veiled character of the earth and the default absence of the
gods at work in the fourfold, just as there is a deep connection between the
presence of mortals and the unveiling of the sky. For, as we stated earlier,
the fourfold is ultimately concerned with individuation by way of mea-
sure. Consider Heidegger’s words when he writes, “What is the measure
for human measuring? God? No. The sky? No. The manifestness of the
sky? No. The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains
unknown, is revealed as such by the sky.”71 Thus, contra Young’s sugges-
tion that earth and sky form the axis of nature and mortals and divinities
form the axis of culture, it is actually that the quarter (rather than axis)
formed by earth and divinities is where nature is given as absent and veiled
and the quarter produced by sky and mortals as present and unveiled is
where culture is: culture reveals nature as such for Heidegger.
Following this quarterial vision we can thus see the fourfold not as
fourfold but another duality of identity expressed as (earth and divinities)
and (sky and mortals).72 If, following Laruelle, an identity is always what
is One in-the-last-instance, then this duality must be thought unilaterally.
But since this duality is in actuality a set of two dualities, the act of uni-
lateralization will require three operations. First unilateralize the duality
of the two sets ([earth/divinities] and [sky/mortals]) and then deal with
the real identities at work in these two sets. In-the-last-instance the set of
sky and mortals is determined by the set of earth and divinities. That is,
culture is determined in the last instance by nature and culture has no real
effect on nature as such. For, even if culture plays its part in the destruction
of the biosphere, it does so naturally. Nature remains perverse in the face
of culture and quite explicitly nature’s perversion is found in the very exis-
tence of culture as it is at work naturally in the biosphere. Yet the thinking
of nature in this dyad is caught. Always a thought of two terms in rela-
tion: earth and divinities in Heidegger’s terminology. These two terms can
stand in for a number of different terms in the history of thought and the
relationship between the two terms varies depending on the system at play.
The idea of “Nature,” with the capital N intended, is often aligned with
Heidegger’s earth. This is Nature of philosophies of immanence as well as
naturalism. It is often thought in relation to God, aligned with Heidegger’s
divinities in this case, and is the God of theological thinking as well as any
form of philosophical transcendence that claims to be outside of the condi-
tions of what is (so of course simple change is not transcendent in this way).
It is by looking at these terms, Nature and God as understood to be generic
terms related to Heidegger’s earth and divinities, that we will unilateralize
this dyad or think nature as in-One. We will begin thinking through the
relations of these two terms ostensibly by looking at the way they func-
tion in St. Thomas Aquinas, before turning to Benedict de Spinoza and,
breaking with what might seem like a historical survey, turning to Ismaili
thinkers Abu Ya’qûb al-Sijistânî and somewhat on Na īr al-Dīn ūsī. But
by engaging with these historical thinkers I am not aiming to provide a
definitive reading. While I have made traditional studies of these think-
ers in preparing for this chapter, I do not present these as studies as such.
Instead, those studies have allowed me to treat these thinkers minimally,
as occasions that provide simple material with which to work.
Thus the theory I put forth here is neither Thomist, Spinozist, nor
Ismaili. What we have done here is change the fourfold from where the
“World worlds” and turned it into an n-dimensional ecosystem. We have
shown that the World, an image of representation, is separate from the
ecosystem, which is always an identity of flowing energy amid identities
that are radically immanent in the ecosystem. For now the claim is that the
set of earth and divinities is unilaterally related to the axis of earth and sky
(biosphere), while recognizing that an element of this set is found in the
axis. By unilateralizing the fourfold in this way we have actually treated
it as an ecosystem such that the set of earth and divinities operates as the
living, the dead (earth), and the never-living (divinities) aspect of the eco-
system. This thesis will appear as if it were standard reductive naturalism,
and this is why there is a need to work out the real identities of earth and
divinities as they are found at work in other philosophical and theological
attempts to think nature. In a certain way what we’re practicing here is an
ideational “forcing” or forçage in the French. This is usually ascribed to
a technical aspect in set theory related to showing how all terms can be
generic without having to do the infinite equations required to actually
derive such a result. But the term also refers to a more obviously ecological
practice of forcing a particular plant to grow when it wouldn’t be able to.
This may involve planting and growing the roots late in the season, as in
the summer, and then taking the roots out in the fall to be forced or grown
indoors out of season. Or, more commonly, greenhouses are another exam-
ple of forcing. In each case the plant is removed from its wider ecosystem,
such that the soil it grows in is not the same soil that grows in the front
garden and so it is not using the nutrients in the same way it would. In the
next chapter we will practice this in relation to the four terms discussed
before turning to bringing these newly identified terms together again.
Chapter 12
Materials for a Theory of Nature
Materials, Energies, and

Populations (of) Thought
A theory of nature that is thought separately from the World must be both
non-philosophical and non-theological. It must be both for the theory and
must avoid the trap of a Principle of Sufficient Philosophy that would cir-
cumscribe nature as a thing captured and examined by its own thought.
It must also avoid an all-too-easy reversibility with God. In this way the
hypostasized Nature of naturalism is a form of theological thinking. So,
the theory must be non-philosophical in order to think nature as in-One,
radically autonomous and foreclosed in-the-last-instance to thought, which
nevertheless remains relatively autonomous, and must be non-theological
to avoid the Principle of Sufficient Theology where the relatively autono-
mous thought becomes a mere echo of authority, not only of the standard
theologies of Worldly religious authorities, but also the unacknowledged
theologies at work in those naturalisms that aim to “mirror Nature.” The
practice of thinking outside these specular forms of thinking, with their
complementary forms of self-sufficiency discussed already in part I, is the
unilateralization of this dyad of earth and divinities.
This dyad is the mixed-up thinking of nature, always in some rela-
tionship between God and Nature, for theology and philosophy. We can
demonstrate this by looking at Aquinas and Spinoza as paradigmatic
examples of theological and philosophical processes, respectively. Again,
not as different truncheons ready at hand for the police (both theologi-
cally, philosophically, but also politically), but in its ecological process as
an expression of piety.
Creation as Apophatic Name of Nature

Aquinas’s thought, following that of Pseudo-Dionysius, undertakes the
theological task of speaking about God as God in an indirect and nega-
tive, or apophatic, fashion. Yet the form of such an apophatic thinking
is given in Aquinas’s understanding of veiling and unveiling, of absence
and presence. In other words apophaticism is directly related to nature
and God. This conception of the relationship between nature and God is
encapsulated in his understanding of the doctrine of creation where the
veiled (God) covers over and determines nature (absent or unconscious as
lived experience in the everyday) for nature only has positive being insofar
as it points toward what will always remain veiled in itself. Creation comes
to be the locus for an apophaticism, not of the Divine, but ultimately of
nature itself. Such an apophaticism is not theistic in the usual sense, for in
mainstream philosophical argument theism tends to portray a God that
typically looks a great deal like a being or absolute entity that exists inde-
pendently of the rest of reality. This theistic conception of God tends to
think of creation as something added on to thinking about God, and while
Aquinas clearly sets up an absolute hierarchy between creatures and the
Creator, all knowledge of that absolute hierarchy and thus all knowledge
of that Creator are dependent upon nature being creation. Creation is a
truly nontheistic theological conception of the ontology of nature inso-
far as it exists in cognitive tension as rationally understandable through a
relational or ecological reason and at the same time understood under the
strictures of faith as attested to in the biblical revelation of an absolutely
transcendent God. This notion of Aquinas as a nontheistic theologian in
the tension between ecological reason and biblical faith follows on from
the work of Rudi te Velde who states that, for Aquinas, the concept of God
spoken about theologically and philosophically is truly “the concept of the
relationship of God and world, conceived as an ordered plurality of diverse
beings, each of which receives its being from the divine source of being.
For Thomas there is no thinking of God concretely outside this relation-
ship.”1 This relational form of thinking is the proper way to understand
clearly Aquinas’s metaphysical formulation of the divine reality or action
of God as ipsum esse per se subsistens, or self-subsistent being.2 For, as Velde’s
work allows us to see, such a formulation is not strictly speaking a defini-
tion of God but of the relationship of God and world or creation. Aquinas
could have simply stated ipsum esse (being itself), instead this being, inher-
ent to all things that are, is also the ipsum esse of the cause of all beings.
Thus to think God is to think, for Aquinas, not abstract being as such but
that simple abstract being in relation to the diversity of perfections that are
Materials for a Theory of Nature 191
unified in their cause, which is that simple being.3 Thus, at the heart of his
doctrine of God is creation.
With regard to the human capacity to understand God, analogy allows
one to recognize the epistemological limits in thinking about God as tran-
scendent, but also to locate what can be known through an investigation
of God’s effects. This doctrine takes its mature formulation in the Summa
Contra Gentiles where, before moving into the argument for the doctrine
of analogy, Aquinas affirms the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius at
the same time as he affirms that names can be predicated of God.4 He does
this through a differentiation of meaning and signification. The mode of
signification, thinking of God in relation to other things we call good, is
imperfect for those good things are never good in themselves. They are
related to God as cause or as that by which they are as effect. This means
that when we predicate God by the name “good” we have predicated an
imperfection in the mode of signification. The term that has the status of
creation in the analogy is imperfect, as its being good is dependent on the
other term of the analogy—God.5 In this way the thinking of any created
thing relates us immediately back to God via their imperfection as effect
and not cause in itself. To understand how something is good we have to
transcend what they are and move to that by which they are. Then, in order
to understand God at all we recognize that the imperfection of the thing
that has goodness does not befit God, but the meaning in some eminent
way does befit God. With regard to such names that hold in their positive
nature imperfection, such as a good thing, Aquinas writes, “such names,
therefore, as Dionysius teaches, can be both affirmed and denied of God.
They can be affirmed because of the meaning of the name; they can be
denied because of the mode of signification.”6
There are other names that Aquinas says are said of God alone, as
they express perfections unavailable to creatures, and belong to him
through the mode of supereminence.7 This mode of supereminence can
only be expressed through negation, as when we say that God is in-finite,
un-composed, im-mutable, or un-divided.8 These supereminent expres-
sions were not thought by Aquinas to be found in the sensible world and in
that sense they cannot be investigated for a further understanding of God’s
being. We may even go so far as to suggest they are but a matter of fact,
but a fact that stands against further positive knowledge and only allowing
knowledge as wonder. The desire caused by this wonder may be assuaged
by recourse to an investigation of the relation creation has to God, “as
when [God] is called the first cause or the highest good.”9 This is the indirect
way of understanding God, through the divine action in creation. Thus we
are given the full apophatic structure of Aquinas’s thought in the preamble
to his discussion of analogy: “[W]e cannot grasp what God is, but only
what [God] is not and how other things are related to [God].”10 This is
then a two-pronged apophaticism—a negative knowledge of what God is
not and an indirectly positive knowledge of God that devastates the idea
that creatures have positive being in themselves.
For analogy to work as a tool of piety it must have both aspects of this
apophaticism. Only in this way can it form thought and direct attention
in a way that satisfies the demands placed upon Aquinas by his situation.
It must give attention to the dependency of humanity, as well as the rest
of creation, on a God who is perfect being itself. At the same time it has
to give attention to the true understanding of God of which humanity,
and perhaps the rest of creation, must have some access other than (non-
existent) pure revelation. As Aquinas understands them, the other gram-
mars or conceptions of how human persons may name and thus think
about God, as qualified by the Christian creeds and Church Fathers, do
not give sufficient attention. Thus univocal predication is not sufficient in
Aquinas’s view because it both implicitly denies the radical otherness of
God and attempts to give access to knowledge of God through some third
term. The radical otherness of God is not respected in univocal predi-
cation because it attempts to find some commonality between God and
creatures through either a genus, a species, a difference, an accident, or
a property.11 The third term that allows access to a certain knowledge of
God also removes the difference between God and creation by subjecting
them to a concept that is simpler than the other two. Aquinas affirms
the demands of orthodoxy on this point and writes, “Now, there can be
nothing simpler than God either in reality or in concept.”12 If there were
a concept simpler than God it would mean there was a concept that has a
perfection that, by ontological definition, can only be said to belong, via
supereminence, to God.
Equivocal predication gives insufficient attention to the relationship
of God and creatures, as it allows no understanding of an order of cause
and effect between two terms.13 For there to be such an understanding a
thing must have some understanding of its own identity, what Aquinas
calls “likeness,” in itself, whereas equivocal predication erases this iden-
tity through the unity of the name.14 This identity, or likeness to God
through the relationship of a cause to its effects, is necessary for there to be
any reasoning of God at all. Since creatures are not God and thus cannot
know God as Godself they must proceed in their reasoning from crea-
tures, which share a likeness to God as God’s effects, to God, as cause.15
In this way equivocal predication of God, as Aquinas understands it, gives
no access to any knowledge of God in much the same way that univo-
cal predication does not. Equivocal predication tells us nothing because
it posits a unity of name that erases the relationship of creatures to God,
thereby misdirecting attention away from the dependent being of creatures

to pure linguistic-metaphysical speculation. Univocal predication, on the
other hand, posits a third term, which contradicts Christian piety as well
as ontological definition by erasing the names that name God’s perfection
and constitute our negative knowing of God.
For analogy to direct attention in the way Aquinas demands it must
limit itself to two terms: God and creation.16 This relational knowing allows
for the aforementioned two-pronged apophaticism. First, it recognizes the
epistemological strictures as determined by God’s perfection that deter-
mine that we can only know what God is not. At the same time it locates
the access of indirect knowledge to God through creatures. As creatures
are not perfect it follows logically that words we ascribe to creatures, such
as “good” or “alive,” apply to God as perfections upon which creatures are
purely dependent. Aquinas says as much when he writes: “Thus, therefore,
because we come to a knowledge of God from other things, the reality in
the names said of God and other things belongs by priority in God accord-
ing to [God’s] mode of being, but the meaning of the name belongs to
God by posterity. And so [God] is said to be named from [God’s] effects.”17
Analogy is thus a matter of our understanding or sense of reality. Reality
here refers to that which is understood both in terms of the contemporary
doxa as mundane or the “mere” of everyday life, and as the divine reality
of God and God’s outworking love in creation. It is thus very tempting
to think of Aquinas as a sort of Kantian avant la lettre in that analogi-
cal knowing appears to be purely epistemological, setting limits around
that knowledge, and giving us some access to reality. This reading has
been propagated by some analytic readings of Aquinas on the question
of being.18 There exist resources in Aquinas himself to suggest another
reading that would align him with what I characterize as ontologically
significant apophaticism. But what is meant by ontologically significant
apophaticism? Essentially it presents reality as always having a remainder
beyond what can be consciously thought or experienced, and says that
this remainder is real and not just an epistemic weakness in thinking. In
this way it is kataphatic as apophatic, as the apophaticism does not negate
reality, or its parts, but speaks to something really beyond this negation,
without reifying that beyond as a thing.
The beginning of ontologically significant apophaticism begins with the
recognition of epistemological limits to reason already held by apophatic
theologians, in a different form, before the Kantian critical philosophy.
This limit itself has a limit, for we are able to know some aspects of things
with certainty, or else even apophatic knowledge would not be possible.
Aquinas locates this in his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate where
he distinguishes between “knowing that and knowing what ” writing: “We
know what something is when we understand the essence of it—what

makes it what it is—either directly, or [indirectly] by way of something
that sufficiently displays what it essentially is.”19 This kind of knowledge is
possible, in Aquinas’s view, when our senses grasp the thing but not when
only the mind can grasp it. This position has the consequence that we
cannot know immaterial substances such as God except by analogy from
those we sense. As is becoming a familiar trope, and one that is decidedly
important for understanding Aquinas’s thought, we precede to knowledge
of God through knowledge of creation. To be clear Aquinas is claiming
that we can know what something is—an apodictic knowledge of its
essence—if it exists in the realm of the sensible, but analogy cannot allow
us to know the highest within thought apodictically: “so analogy from
substances we sense can’t lead us to know immaterial ones sufficiently
well.”20 It would appear to some that Aquinas is destroying the possibility
of any secure theological knowledge. Aquinas himself writes, “During this
life then we have no way of knowing what these immaterial substances are,
either by natural knowledge or by revelation.”21 However he safeguards a
point of secure theological knowledge by arguing that though “we are left
not knowing what such immaterial forms are” we do know “that they are,
whether we know this by natural reasons’ arguments, from created effects,
or by revelation’s use of analogies drawn from what we sense.”22
This is more than epistemological humility, for when we connect it to the
doctrine of analogy it says something significant about the reality of nature
itself. This is clear as Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy is connected inextrica-
bly to his metaphysical account of the divine causality in creation. Velde
sums this up succinctly when he states: “Analogy is meant to articulate the
commonness of effect [creation] and cause [God]: the effect is differently
the same as its cause, precisely insofar as it is being.”23 The first instance
of this connection between creation (as Nature) and analogy is found in
a short text entitled De principiis naturae [On the Principles of Nature],
which Aquinas wrote at the age of 25.24 This text was a short exposition on
causality that is largely dependent on the Islamic Aristotelian philosophy
of Ibn-Rushd.25 As this is a text on the principles of nature it can only be
understood as an ontological text, while at the same time it demonstrates
a deep recognition of the epistemological strictures present when a human
being attempts to understand not only God, but even nature.26 Some inter-
esting aspects of an early conception of analogy come out in this text, due
in part to it being developed as a largely secular text. So we find that it does
not once use the word “God,” but ultimately still leads to the theological
insight that gives to God the place of cause of everything. So even though
the word “God” does not appear in the text, his formulation of causality
and end or goal clearly applies to his understanding of the divine action if
read in the light of his later works. After running through defining expla-
nations of the three principles of nature (matter, form, and lack of form)
Aquinas turns to writing on “ultimate matter” or “first matter.”27 Ultimate
matter is defined paradoxically by Aquinas in this way: “Only material
subject to form and lack of form but having no particular form or lack of
form in itself can be called ultimate matter, because it presupposes no other
material; and another name for it is [hyle].”28
In Aquinas’s account of nature’s three principles ultimate matter appears
as a remainder, in that it cannot be thought rationally like the other three,
but can nevertheless be argued for as underling reality. The only reason
that ultimate matter may be thought at all is because of analogy. He writes,
“But since we define and know things by way of their forms, ultimate
matter can’t be known or defined as such, but only by an analogy, as that
which relates to all forms and lack of forms as bronze does to statues and
to shapelessness, and so is ultimate.”29 That is, as Aquinas shows us the
principles of nature through analogy with intentional human produc-
tion like statue making, the mind may easily begin to think that there is
some ultimate kind of potential matter like bronze is for the statue. Some
would suggest that this is an illegitimate anthropomorphism of nature, but
Aquinas is being quite ecological here as human beings are also natural and
thus their actions can be understood to be part of wider natural causation.
On a further ecological note, ultimate matter cannot be known directly as
what it is in itself but only through its relations with other things. Analogy
may then be defined as knowing through relation. Ultimate matter can
only be speculated about via an analogy with material that does have par-
ticular form and lack of form and thus Aquinas can make claims about it,
but nothing about it in itself other than what is given by logical necessity.
These claims are ultimately speculative, even little leaps of faith, for we
know individuation or generation through forms and thus, Aquinas leads
us to think, within our own limited ability to know, we have to say that
“[n]othing actually existent then can be called ultimate matter.”30
But to return to the question of whether this relational knowledge
occurs through some agreement only in one’s understanding or in the
wider reality outside that understanding, we note that to know that some-
thing is “implies some vague knowledge of what ” it is.31 Aquinas is using
the notion of analogical knowledge, where knowledge is always connected
to the truth of its being true, to mediate between totalizing knowledge and
equally totalizing ignorance. Furthermore it suggests that knowledge
through analogy implies the truth of being analogically. All knowledge,
in Aquinas’s thought, must ultimately follow the vacillation of theologi-
cal knowing—between knowledge that leads to possession of being by
its being known and ignorance, which leads to vice. In this way all true
knowledge has an analogy with Aquinas’s conception of God’s “rustic”

knowledge of real singulars.32 God’s knowledge comes not through its
being related to real singulars, though there is a relation, but through a
proportionality of God’s being as cause.33 God’s knowledge cannot come
through relation because if God were to know through an absolute relation
rather than through a proportion of God’s own being, then this would
suggest that God was subject to relationality rather than relationality being
subject to God. Thus, following the circular logic of analogy, our own
knowledge similarly “corresponds” by proportion between what is given in
the mind and what is true: “Because for Aquinas truth ‘corresponds’ not
by copying but by a new analogical realization of something in the mind
in an inscrutable ‘proportion’ to how it is in reality.”34
Following this notion the analogical reasoning that leads to ultimate
matter proceeds to the idea that, in reality and not merely in our under-
standing, nature is not reducible to matter. Setting aside the hylomorphism
present in much of Aquinas’s writing, which is suspect in light of modern
biological and physical sciences that Aquinas could not have known, we
can still locate a significant contribution to the explication of an ecological
ontology of nature in an apophatic mode. Matter, it would be expected,
explains a great deal about nature. Yet, despite our growing understanding
of what matter is, we are not able to understand some of the most basic
aspects of nature through matter. Is this lack in our understanding due to
the epistemological limits of thinking or do those epistemological limits
on one aspect of nature, human understanding, speak to a certain what-
ness about nature itself? Nature is not reducible to matter precisely because
such a matter, which would be ultimate, is itself not locatable in actuality
as thought and must exceed itself through some form of otherness in order
to actually exist. This transcendental claim is repeated at the level of the
ecosystem where matter can be located within the ecosystem while the
ecosystem itself is not locatable simply from the exchange of matter.
It follows that nature understood as reducible to matter would be to
think about nature through only one aspect. Ecological reason tells us
there must be some relation in order to conceive of nature at all. Nature
understood through matter must be conceived in one of two ways, either
nature is only material and thus does not make up all of reality or nature
is ultimate matter. As ultimate matter has already been shown to not exist
in actuality it follows that we cannot conceive of nature in this way. Yet,
the first way of understanding nature, as only material, fails to provide a
concept of nature that is not mere tautology. If nature is merely material,
then why speak of nature at all, and instead why not just speak of mate-
rial? Rather, the thatness of nature as not reducible to matter speaks to
the significant, but not yet adequately understood, whatness of nature’s
real, constant exceeding of matter. Nature can thus be given the apophatic
name “creation” to express this reality.
As an apophatic name of nature, creation bequeaths a powerful notion
to the thinking of nature in philosophy and theology in ontologically sig-
nificant apophaticism. However, as purely Thomistic such ontologically
significant apophaticism has its own limits, which are located in its think-
ing from analogy. While this section attempts to show the strength of
Aquinas’s thinking from analogy it must also return to the use of Aquinas
by the police (again, following Jordan’s terminology) and ask what makes
Aquinas’s thinking so easily amenable to such reactionary use. The
trade-off for giving a certain divine dignity to creation through apophati-
cally thinking it as God’s effects is that God’s transcendence as limit to
violence is undermined, though not destroyed. That is, in non-theological
terms, thinking from analogy suffers from its own version of the natural-
ist fallacy. Analogy must proceed from what is in order to understand the
nature of the divine. In doing so it lacks any kind of organon for selection
and thus may select, as Aquinas himself did, an analogy of monarchy:
“[W]hatever is in accord with nature is best, for nature always operates for
the best. But in nature government is always by one. [ . . . ] Among the bees
is one king bee, and in the whole universe one God is the Maker and Ruler
of all.”35 Here Aquinas proceeds not from an understanding of nature to a
properly analogical understanding of God but from what human govern-
ment is to a misunderstanding of what government in nature is and then
to a conception of God’s governance. Bees, we now know, do not have any
one ruler as the queen of a particular hive does not direct the action of that
hive; the hive, rather, proceeds in a way altogether unlike human govern-
ment from monarchy to democracy. Indeed, what is in nature may be best,
because it is what is, but what is in nature is varied. Its organization is not
reducible to any one organization and thus analogy may not find a secure
position from any one part of nature and may not be able to think from the
whole of nature in ways that allow it to remain orthodox.
The problem with analogy is then that the entire process of analogi-
cal predication is unable to function outside of the purely metaphysical.
In terms of a doctrine of God the apophaticism of creation is productive,
but it is only productive on the basis of a second-order negation of nature.
I have shown that when one selects from what is (nature) to know God,
subsequently, that which is (the natural thing) is shown to truly be relative
to the ipsum esse per subsistans. We first know by way of something natural,
but that knowledge is then perfected in the abstract thinking of God thus
negating the autonomy of what is natural in the light of its cause. This
apophatic thinking of creation ultimately pulls the ground out from under
the one thinking, for what the perversity of nature resists is the selection
of a part of nature. Thus what we ultimately have in Aquinas’s seemingly

complete system of theology is actually but an ecosystem named creation
that is characterized by a minimal and rigid exchange of energies between
God and creatures that says nothing positive about nature as such. This
analogical ecosystem can only produce a negation of nature and ultimately,
in so doing, provides no way of thinking positively about God outside an
abstract metaphysics.
Here we see both the theological erasure of nature and its reversibility
into a naturalism unmoored from the duration of lived nature (which is of
course from the exchange of matter and energy between the living, dead,
and never-living aspects of the ecosystem). For analogy is unable to select
one aspect of nature with which to speak of God, instead collapsing into
a perpetual loop of selection creating a relatively unstable system that is
easily disturbed. It is Spinoza who is able to finally think a consistency to
God that runs from the metaphysical to the ethical by selecting the varia-
tion in nature.
The Chimerical Immanence of God or Nature
Spinoza has been much maligned by the theological establishment, both of

his own time and of the contemporary era. So it is no surprise that there is
an incredible difference between Aquinas and Spinoza, but it is a difference
that goes deeper than simply their different historical situations or even
their different positions within faith. The difference lies in the fact that if
Aquinas had no organon of selection and thus analogy became a perpetual
loop of selection between God and nature, Spinoza instead selected nature
in its infinity (which should not be confused with the nature’s status as per-
verse in this work). This is what Goodchild called Spinoza’s cynical equivo-
cation of God and nature, where upon asking a metaphysical question he
instead gives a material answer. Again the play of veiling and unveiling,
presence and absence is vital here. For when someone demands that veiled,
God, be unveiled and our attention directed toward that unveiling, Spinoza
claims to practice that unveiling by directing attention toward what is
absent or unconscious, nature as the lived experience of the everyday. In
response to demands to give attention to transcendence, Spinoza directs
attention to immanence and claims the two are equivalent. Unveiling
remains absent, but neither is God veiled now nor is nature present in a way
that would allow an individual to circumscribe it. The veil is seen and it is
seen in nature. Yet this cynical equivocation is more powerfully seen not as
a rejection of the metaphysical, as Diogenes the Cynic’s own gestures could
be interpreted, but as the creation of a chimera between God or nature,

between a lofty metaphysical question and what matters in the everyday.
François Zourabichvili locates the chimera at the heart of Spinoza’s thought,
existing in a tension between a critique of the chimerical tendencies and
a strategy of the chimera as a constitutive practice of that thought. Thus
Spinoza both critiques those who peddle snake oil, exploiting the confusion
caused by chimerical reasoning, and claims that chimeras and metamor-
phoses are the ground of thought.36 Zourabichvili defines the chimera as
that “whose nature veils [enveloppe] an open contradiction” and that which
“by its nature, cannot exist,” going on to write that “[t]he chimera is not a
thing but, if we can put it this way, a non-thing, a non-nature.”37 In a bril-
liant use of Zourabichvili’s reading, Rocco Gangle argues that the positive
strategy of the chimera creates a system-dependent meaning of a common
word that reveals the system-dependent meaning of that word in its more
traditional contexts from which it was derived.38 And where is this strategy
of the chimera most obvious? In Spinoza’s writing on the name of God
where he creates “the impossible equation” God, or Nature.39
Yet this equivocation, this directing of attention away from the per-
petual looping of analogical selection, is often confused with something
altogether less interesting. For it is common for Spinoza to be held up
as the progenitor of a “clear-thinking,” positivist style atheism.40 In part
this is due to Spinoza’s criticisms of religion especially as found in his
Theological-Political Treatise, but the real persistence of this reading of
Spinoza is a fundamental distrust in Spinoza’s words by modern readers.
This strategy of reading Spinoza is traced by Nancy K. Levene who locates
the general thrust of it at work in Leo Strauss’s study of Spinoza where
Spinoza’s real meaning is esoteric. Thus, as modern secular readers, Strauss
contends that we are able to read the true meaning of what is hidden in
Spinoza’s text. Strauss, following Harry Wolfson, holds that at the time
of writing Spinoza (like Maimonides) was unable to simply lay out his
philosophical system without risking a hostile religious response.41 If this
were true there would be nothing of any real interest in Spinoza. His work
would simply be a proto-positivist philosophy of common sense and indeed
this is what many crude atheist readings of Spinoza present. Like Thomas
Jefferson’s construction of a humanist version of the New Testament, these
thinkers attempt to scrub Spinoza’s thought of all theology and yet when
you take God (or nature) out of the Ethics you are left with a system that
no longer functions and you are left with a politics (Theological-Political
Treatise) and an ontology (Ethics) ultimately unrelated at the level of con-
cept and practice.
Interestingly these esoteric readings run aground because Spinoza does
not hide his equivocation of God and Nature. If he were writing secretly to
those who knew he didn’t really believe in God, why would he come right
out into the open and write, in perhaps the clearest section of his Ethics,
“[t]hat eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same
necessity from which he exists.”42 For this is actually the productive power
of Spinoza’s philosophy. Consider that the general formula of Spinoza’s
ontological scheme can at first appear to be a kind of rationalist reworking
of Neoplatonism. From that perspective, the Ethics begins with a single
substance not unlike the Neoplatonic One and like it this substance must
be one since it is that which is in itself and conceived in itself. Therefore
substance, like the One, does not require the concept of another thing
for it to be formed.43 This substance is God (or nature) and from God (or
nature) attributes can be located, which are what the intellect takes to be
the essence of substance.44 Spinoza holds that there are an infinite num-
ber of these attributes, but that the intellect can have knowledge of two:
Thought and Extension.45 There are then also modes that are finite actuali-
ties or “affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which
it is also conceived.”46 A cursory reading of Spinoza could confuse this
schema with a kind of poor Neoplatonic emanationism where substance =
the One (not to be confused with the non-philosophical One), attributes
= Nous, and the World Soul and its divisions with the modes. But what
is productive in Spinoza’s thought is the way that emanation is completely
changed through the equivocation of God, nature, and substance by way
of immanent causality.47 But what happens through this equivocation is
not an overcoding of one term by the other, a kind of secular determination
to counter the prevailing theological determination of Spinoza’s time, but a
complete change in the understanding of both terms.
So, while Levene does not fully deal with Spinoza’s Marrano foundation,
Strauss and Wolfson aim to overcode the population (of) thought called
God with an all-too-easy conception of nature as assumed by the myth
of Enlightenment reason. They miss out that both God and nature are
changed in Spinoza’s thought. As Nancy Levene writes, “From a religious
standpoint, God is eternal and nature is made; from a non-religious stand-
point, God is made and nature is eternal. Both, to Spinoza, are right.”48
Or as Blayton Polka writes, “Deus sive natura. God is (infinitely) natural.
But nature is also (infinitely) divine.”49 The minimal difference between
these two quotations discloses something important about Spinoza’s prac-
tice of thought. For Levene’s statement it is a question of standpoint, of the
thinker thinking the thought, and for Polka’s statement it is a question of
ontology, what God and Nature really are. The reality of Spinoza’s practice
is that both statements are true, for the standpoint of a thinker thinking
a true idea and the being of that idea are the same. This is commonly
called parallelism, though as Deleuze reminds us we should be somewhat
cautious with this terms since it was not Spinoza’s own but appears to
come from Leibniz.50 But Deleuze goes on to say that “Spinoza’s doctrine
is rightly named ‘parallelism,’ but this [is] because it excludes any analogy,
any eminence, any transcendence. Parallelism, strictly speaking, is to be
understood neither from the viewpoint of occasional causes, nor from the
viewpoint of ideal causality, but only from the viewpoint of an immanent
God and immanent causality.”51 In other words what parallelism really
concerns is three forms of identity rather than difference: an identity of
order or correspondence between modes of different attributes, identity
of connection or equality of principle, and identity of being or ontological
unity.52 In other words, to say that there is a parallelism between the modes
of the attributes Thought and Extension is to say that they are the same
thing or as Spinoza himself puts it, “So also a mode of extension and the
idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways.”53
One could even take Laruelle’s vocabulary and say that in-last-instance
they have the same identity and they are distinguished only by the other
attributes that their idea involves.54
This focus on identity arises in response to a problem. For it would
appear that in Spinoza’s universe there can be no causal interaction between
ideas and bodies. This has to do with the relationship between knowledge
of causes and effects, rather than the in-itself reality of those causes and
effects. For, with regard to Substance what we can know is actually very
little, but we can have knowledge of its essence as expressed in the attri-
butes Thought and Extension. Yet Spinoza states that “[t]he knowledge of
an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause.”55 Different
modes fall under different attributes, that is, they are necessarily conceived
in relation to something other than themselves.56 But since each attribute
of a substance must be conceived of through itself, as the essence of the one
substance, then a mode falling under one of the attributes cannot affect a
mode falling under the other.57 Yet, just because these finite modes under
different attributes cannot causally affect one another does not mean they
are unrelated. Instead they share an identity under the three forms Deleuze
located and that are discussed earlier. For “[t]he order and connection of
ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”58
In the Ethics this form of thought is only discussed in relation to the
modes. But, as Deleuze says, “it is grounded in substance and the attri-
butes of substance.”59 Thus parallelism of modes only makes sense insofar
as there is a principle of identity at work. Again, Deleuze captures this
point with aplomb:
God produces all things in all attributes at once: he produces them in the
same order in each, and so there is a correspondence between modes of
different attributes. But because attributes are really distinct this correspon-
dence, or identity of order, excludes any causal action of one on another.
Because the attributes are all equal, there is an identity of connection
between modes differing in attribute. Because attributes constitute one
and the same substance, modes that differ in attribute form one and the
same modification. One may in a sense see in this the triad of substance
“descending” into the attributes and communicating itself to the modes.60
Thus the doctrine of parallelism is again an expression of the immanence

of God or nature that is present in actualities, though perhaps veiled and
absent as Heidegger suggests.
While we have touched on a number of important elements of Spinoza’s
thought and attempted to locate them in their process of directing atten-
tion, we have not yet really touched on the importance of this way of
thinking for our non-philosophical and non-theological theory of nature.
Quite simply, Spinoza’s theoretical explication of an equivocal immanence
between God and nature breaks naturalism and frees thought to think
nature in the decline of naturalism. In the previous section we credited
Aquinas’s apophatic ontology of nature with separating a thought of nature
from a circular materialism and yet we faulted him for creating a kind of
naturalistic fallacy endemic to theological forms of thinking. This was
because Aquinas had to think from what is in order to conceive of God
and what is is varied. It may seem like Spinoza would also be faulted for
a naturalistic fallacy, perhaps more so since he directly equates God and
nature. Yet, Spinoza’s equivocation ultimately rejects the pure nature of
naturalism more radically than Aquinas. This is precisely because he sepa-
rates philosophy and theology from one another in the Theological-Political
Treatise while bringing together their ostensible objects God and nature in
the Ethics. The confusion lies in the fact that the first separation is ulti-
mately a heuristic one within the practice of thinking itself, while the other
is taken to be an ontological equivocation.
Now, if I am correct that Spinoza radically breaks with a kind of natu-
ralism that posits a simple, closed, and oppressive form of hypostasized
Nature, then the entirety of his theological-political thought depends
on what nature is for him in its chimerical identity as God or nature.
In the Theological-Political Treatise we find that Spinoza holds to a posi-
tion that seems a great deal like Aquinas’s. There he writes: “Again, since
nothing can exist or be conceived without God, it is certain that every
single thing in nature involves and expresses the conception of God as far
as its essence and perfection allows, and according the more we come to
understand natural things, the greater and more perfect the knowledge of
God we acquire.”61 He goes on to connect this explicitly to understanding
the cause, which is God, through its effects, which is nature or creation,
because, “since knowledge of an effect through a cause is simply to know
some property of the cause,” then “the more we learn about natural things,
the more perfectly we come to know the essence of God (which is cause of
all things); and thus all our knowledge, that is, our highest good, not only
depends on a knowledge of God but consists in it altogether.”62
There is then an identity of correspondence again between the cause and
effect here. Unlike in Aquinas this bears itself out in a political and social
thought that moves from the selection of the variance of nature rather than
from particulars and this has implications for Spinoza’s understanding of
natural right. His notion of natural right follows from nature’s perfection,
which refuses reason demanding anything contrary to Nature and thus
demands that “everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really
useful to him, want what will really lead a man to greater perfection, and
absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as
he can.”63 This is sometimes taken by readers to mean that the strong can
do what they will, by their natural power, to the weak who cannot resist
by their natural power. Conor Cunningham hyperbolically makes the
ridiculous and offensive claim that the equivocation of God, nature, and
substance “has therefore enabled Spinoza to rid the world of all substances
(and eventually of all substance)” such that “in the world of Spinoza there
can be no difference between a Holocaust and an ice-cream.”64 According
to this view Spinoza would hold that if one can perpetuate a Holocaust as
easily as they produce and eat an ice cream, then there is no reason by right
why they should not.
But here we find the Christian theistic theologian Cunningham making
the same mistake as atheists like Nadler, whereby he confuses a preexisting
concept of nature as the same conception of nature at work in Spinoza. While
ultimately this conception is still caught in a dyad with God, it nonetheless
suggests a truly radical conception of nature that can be elucidated by put-
ting it in dialogue with the Catholic debate over pure nature. This debate is
as complex as it is tedious, but we can distil the doctrine to the idea that says
there is some part of God’s creation independent of a desire for God. This
would mean that there would be some part of nature that was free from
the desire for the grace of God and thus sets up a hard dualism between
nature and grace, or nature and the supernatural (God), whereas those who
stand against pure nature would prefer a softer, grammatical dualism gener-
ated by the analogy of being that recognizes only God as true Being. Yet,
Spinoza’s conception of the relationship between God and nature, even as
natura naturata, is nothing like “pure nature.” Indeed, Spinoza critiques
the theology of miracles that contains the seeds that lead to the conceiv-
ing of something like “pure nature” within Christian doctrine itself. The
contemporary theological fixation on pure nature stems in part from the

French theological movement la nouvelle théologie, the main works of which
were written in the early and mid-twentieth century. The argument between
la nouvelle théologie and the then more accepted neo-Scholasticism of fig-
ures like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange concerned whether or not the theol-
ogy of the Roman Catholic Church, and thus the theology of Augustine
and Aquinas, demanded a stark dualism between nature and grace. For the
neo-Scholastics there was a natural ground to meaning with a correspond-
ing natural telos that was opposed to the supernatural order of revelation
with its own corresponding supernatural telos. For la nouvelle théologie there
was only one order toward one supernatural telos. They therefore argued
that there is a natural desire for the supernatural; one order and one telos.
If this was true then it would follow that the neo-Scholastics’ conception
of the supernatural was merely the natural upon which perfections were
added, and this carries with it some questionable Christology and soteri-
ology, for it begs the question of how something can be saved if it is not
assumed. And if it is assumed how can it then be said to not have an integral
unity, even if unconsummated?65 The main figure of la nouvelle théologie
movement with regard to the natural/supernatural debate is clearly Henri
de Lubac. His historical studies argue that the concept of pure nature is not
to be found in the theologies of Augustine or Aquinas and that they resisted
it because of their “profound realism.”66 But such a profound realism is also
found at work in Spinoza, more so in his selection of the variance of nature.
Thus we find that Spinoza makes his own argument against pure nature in
Chapter 6 of his Theologico-Political Treatise.
Spinoza’s argument here is clear and can be summed up succinctly as
follows: because God is the creator of nature, miracles that transcend the
natural order would imply an imperfection in God’s will and intellect and
thus lead to atheism. He writes,
[S]ince the virtue and power of nature is the very virtue and power of God
and the laws and rules of nature are the very decrees of God, we must
certainly believe that the power of nature is infinite, and its laws so broad
as to extend to everything that is also conceived by the divine understand-
ing. For otherwise what are we saying but that God has created a nature so
impotent and with laws and rules to feeble that He must continually give it
a helping hand, to maintain it and keep it going as He wills; this I certainly
consider to be completely unreasonable.67
Miracles as normally conceived appear as events whose cause is unknown

in nature and from there ascribe a divine origin to them. Spinoza takes us
through the logic of this writing, “They also suppose the existence of God
is proven by nothing more clearly than from what they perceive as nature
failing to follow its natural course. [ . . . ] They evidently hold that God
is inactive whilst nature follows its normal course and, conversely, that
the power of nature and natural causes are superfluous whenever God is
active.”68 The position Spinoza is here arguing against is the same under-
standing, though in a crude mode, that the neo-Scholastics gave to the
split between the natural and the supernatural. Spinoza rejects this on the
basis of knowledge of nature, as opposed to the theologically orthodox
understanding of the revelation of Scripture, but knowledge of nature is
taken to be revelatory for questions of metaphysics in the same way that
Scripture is taken to be revelatory for questions of true piety (charity and
justice) and in this way the two are not opposed.
Consider how Spinoza mutates Hobbes’s conception of natural right as
explained by Deleuze through his explication of four theses that come out
of this mutation. The first is that the law of nature refers to an initial desire
and not a state of final perfection. The second thesis is that reason is only
secondary to conatus, or the will to persevere in one’s being. The third the-
sis states that power or right is primary and unconditional, which is to say
prior to reason. The final thesis has two parts: (1) regardless of their powers
of reason every person in the state of nature judges what is good, bad, and
necessary for their preservation; and (2) no one gives up their natural right
due to some recognition of the authority of a wise person, but from either
fear of a greater evil or hope of a greater good. The consequence of these
theses is that the principle of consent, whether pact or contract, replaces
authority as first principle for political philosophy.69
Let us return to the second thesis where Deleuze says, “[No]body is born
reasonable. Reason may perhaps apply and preserve the law of nature, but is
in no sense its principle or motive force. Similarly, nobody is born a citizen.
The civil state may preserve the law of nature, but the state of nature is in
itself presocial, precivil. Further still, nobody is born religious.”70 Deleuze is
here referencing Spinoza’s discussion of the state originating in the natural
and civil right of individuals by way of pact with sovereign powers found
in Chapter 16 of the Theological-Political Treatise where we find Spinoza
responding to a potential criticism that there is a contradiction between the
claim that everyone who is without the use of reason has the sovereign natu-
ral right in a state of nature to live by the laws of appetite and the claim that
all are responsible before the revealed divine law. Spinoza states that this is
true only with respect to humanity’s ignorance in the state of nature:
We can easily deal with this objection simply by examining the state of
nature closely. For this is prior to religion both by nature, and in time.
No one knows from nature that he is bound by obedience towards God.
Indeed, he cannot discover this by reasoning either; he can only receive it

from a revelation confirmed by miracles. Hence prior to revelation, no one
is obliged by divine law, which he simply cannot know. The state of nature
is not to be confused with the state of religion, but must be conceived apart
from religion and law, and consequently apart from all sin and wrongdoing.
This is how we have conceived it, and have confirmed this by the authority
of Paul.71
This may seem at first as if it were setting up a real separation between

something like nature and revelation, but in actuality what Spinoza is
doing here is discussing an image presented to human thought of what
must be rejected. Indeed, “the state of nature itself shows us what makes it
intolerable” insofar as what is fully present there is individual power that
ultimately destroys itself.72 This fabulation is to be contrasted with his
repeated statement that “[n]evertheless, no one can doubt how much more
beneficial it is for men to live according to laws and the certain dictates of
reason, which as I have said aim at nothing but men’s true interests.”73
There are two fundamental points we are to take from this—
(1) humanity is not an imperium within an imperium, we are part of
nature; and (2) we are able to understand the whole of nature and live in
accord with it (also the practical thrust of Spinoza’s Ethics, the writing of
which was interrupted by work on the Theological-Political Treatise). This
second point may at first appear unclear, but can be elucidated by turning
again to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza where he writes,
There could be only one way of making the state of nature viable: by striv-
ing to organize its encounters. Whatever body I meet, I seek what is use-
ful. But there is a great difference between seeking what is useful through
chance (that is, striving to destroy bodies incompatible with our own) and
seeking to organize what is useful (striving to encounter bodies agreeing in
nature with us, in relations in which they agree). Only the second type of
effort defines proper or true utility. [ . . . ] There is in Nature neither Good
nor Evil, there is no moral opposition, but there is ethical difference.74
Such an ethical difference is to be located in the affections that determine

a certain conatus. Thus the more joyful affects a person experiences and
fosters the more ethical they become and the only way to increase joy is
through useful encounters or between mutually joyful affects. The more
we understand about the world the more we understand how our bodies
are compatible with others. In ecological terms, the human species has
the natural right, through its natural ability, to drive forward the sixth
great spasm of extinction, but it does so at great peril to itself and thus to a
decrease in its ability to preserve its being.
Ultimately Spinoza will argue that the State is superior to religious

institutions in bringing about relationships that accord with the common
good (living in accord with nature), for though the Divine Law is higher
than the laws of the State, “God has no special kingdom over men except
through those who hold power” and “for this reason divine teachings [the
practice of justice and charity], whether revealed by natural or prophetic
light, necessarily acquire the force of a decree not directly from God, but
from those who exercise the right of governing and issue edicts or by their
mediation.”75 The State comes to be the site of “true religion,” for if jus-
tice and charity constitute the thrust of the simplicity of the scriptures
and these are fostered within the state more than within the church, then
piety is demonstrated in its highest form in the service of the peace and
tranquility of the commonwealth, which cannot be preserved if every man
is to live simply as an individual.76 Some have read this as a rejection of
religion in favor of the State, but there is another reading that we will fol-
low. In his attempt to separate philosophy and theology, Étienne Balibar
points out, Spinoza’s turning away from theology and toward immanence
may in actuality be a turning toward another, more subtle theology. And
so Spinoza finds himself in the awkward position of defending true reli-
gion after having set out to defend freedom of thought from theology.77
One can read as a consequence of his equivocation in the Ethics of God or
Nature that everything is essentially religious; everything directs its atten-
tion toward God or nature. Thus we can read his political thought, and
perhaps we should take him at his word here, as theological (though not
in terms of dogma) or interior to religion itself. In this philosophy religion
is plunged into conatus as conatus is prior to organized religion (and all
organization), for no one is born religious, but religion also names the
formation of a relationship between humanity and an indifferent “outside”
(nature) that is connected to conatus —therefore it is natural to be religious
even though no one is born so.
Goodchild calls the equivocal immanence of God and Nature cyni-
cal in Spinoza, meaning it directs attention toward that which matters
most. Thus Spinoza’s rejection of pure nature actually gives rise to a poli-
tics, rather than taking what is as a sign of the politics that ought to be.
Consider that for Spinoza salvation is available to all according to their
natural ability (meaning simply to the degree that they actualize their
knowledge). Thus for those who are able to think adequate ideas of God
they are saved in that knowledge:
The third kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of certain

attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things, and
the more we understand things in this way, the more we understand God.
Therefore the greatest virtue of the mind, that is, the mind’s power, or
nature, or its greatest striving, is to understand things by the third kind of
knowledge.78
But the ignorant may also find salvation in simple obedience to the require-
ments of grace and charity demanded of them by religious revelation.79 In
each case, however, the point is that salvation happens in the midst of the
earth. The equivocation of God and nature directs attention toward the
earth, rather than toward some transcendent beyond, and yet it is able to
so without recourse to pure nature. And it does so by making of the earth
a form of transcendence produced by what is immanent. For what is taken
as revelation of transcendence, religious revelation, is revealed in nature.
This is what we will go on to call a non-thetic transcendence or a transcen-
dence that is an effect of immanence, but still expresses the real kernel of
transcendence in actuality.
The Paradoxical One of Ismaili Islam and

Non-Theological Nature
The choice of Aquinas and Spinoza as paradigmatic of particular practices
of thinking through the dyad of God and nature is useful in part because
both thinkers are so systematic in their thought. Yet, this systematic char-
acter can be faulted for confusing the identity of nature with the character
of a system itself. A philosophical system does not mirror nature, nor does
an ecosystem. The system and nature are two, even if some aspects or
“occasions” of nature are produced in the ecosystem. They become con-
fused in both Spinoza and Aquinas because they are ultimately thinking
God and nature in terms of Being, rather than in-One. This problem is
analogous to the one that Laruelle locates in materialism:
In the last instance, it continues to subordinate matter to the ultimate

possible form of the logos (the logos or Idea of matter as such), rather than
subordinating the logos of matter to matter, thereby engaging a genuinely
dispersive becoming-real of ideality instead of a continuous becoming-ideal
of the real. Thus, in order to remain faithful to its original inspiration and
secure a definitive victory over idealism, materialism should first consent
to partially eliminate itself as category and statement—to subordinate its
materialist statements to a process of utterance that would be material, rela-
tive, or hyletic in itself, then stop conceiving of this utterance as an ideal
and relative process. The decline of materialism in the name of matter, and of
matter as hyle in the name of the real .80
And so here we must begin to think the radical decline of naturalism in

the name of nature and of the dyad of God and nature as natural in the
name of the Real.
The problem with this can be located by contrasting the systematic
what is of both Aquinas and Spinoza with a messianic desire for what is
futural (outside of a simple linear “to come”). What is at work in the dyad
of God and nature is a process of absence and veiling. Because nature is in
some sense closer to us than our own selves, it is veiled much like the lenses
one looks through to see. And it is absent insofar as nature seems to be a
universal totality that can never be fully brought to presence. Thus, one
creates certain fictions about nature and even Spinoza, the most virulent
antianthropomorphic thinker covered here, talks about nature in terms of
a human fiction when he talks about the “laws of nature.” Nature comes
to take the force of law precisely because it is both veiled and absent in
ontological thought. It becomes simply what is, even when what is isn’t
pure nature.
This problem can be brought into sharper focus by looking at the way
nature is brought to presence in the other dyad present in the fourfold,
that of sky and mortals or what we suggested could also be called the
identity of culture. Now, in order to break with the sékommça (“it’s like
that” or “that’s how it is”) of naturalism, which is to break with the onto-
logical cage, we need to think a radical creatural messianism. Something
that breaks the cultural and the natural at once. Yet, the two standard
options for thinking nature outside the limits of naturalism subsume that
messianism into something that already is. I am referring, of course, to
the analogical conception and the conception from a position of absolute
immanence. Both end ultimately by making the messiancity of creatures
impossible. For Aquinas the creature is negated in its relationship with the
Creator. For Spinoza immanence is made absolute in the selection of the
whole of nature. Yet this ultimately reduces nature to being and this selec-
tion of nature as whole or “One-All” retains a transcendent shadow of a
quasi thing.81 This allows for a certain liberty in nature, but such liberty
is always limited as determined by its status as Being or what is. In both
instances creatural messianity is impossible because what is has already
been consummated by the death and resurrection of the historical Jesus or,
in less dogmatic terms, what is is already good and requires nothing more
than right order or an ethical relation. In both cases nature comes to be a
name simply for the sékommça. What is needed, then, is some way to think
a messianism that is totally contra-Nature as hypostasized without lapsing
into a pure negation of nature by confusing it with the World.
Ya’qûb al-Sijistânî provides us with a proto-non-theological conception
of nature that differs from both Aquinas and Spinoza. Whereas Aquinas
occludes nature by making creation its proper apophatic name and

Spinoza occludes creation within a subsumption of God and nature into a
One-All substance, al-Sijistânî places nature in the middle of six Creations
that come from the uniqueness of the Creator for whom even essence is
excluded.82 By placing nature as a creation from a Creator that has neither
Being nor essence, al-Sijistânî frees this nature/creation from being sub-
sumed into Being. These are not seven distinct, linear creations, but seven
cyclical Creations that are contained in each other as expressions of the
manifestation of the unique nature of the One, which begins in creation
and runs down through the created from universe to angels to peoples
to prophets before culminating in the resurrection. In non-philosophical
terms, they are clones of the foreclosed One.
Nature is the third Creation and is treated alone, while in the second,
fourth, and fifth Creations there are always two terms that move from
one to the other. By treating nature alone in this way nature is raised to
the same level as the Intelligence (from which the Angels are given their
power and identity) and the Resurrector for Sijistânî. Sijistânî raises nature
to these levels by locating the real identity of nature as Earth rather than
World:
Do you not see that the human being, in whom the most subtle quintes-
sence of the two universes has been concentrated, lives on the earth? His
subsistence is on the Earth. His return is a returning to the Earth, and his
resurrection is a resurgence from the Earth. From these premises it follows
that we have shown that the Earth is not inferior to heaven in dignity and
merits the presence of the angels, since a great number of potentialities
[ puissances] are achieved in the Earth that are in harmony with the angels.
Understand this.83
Christian Jambet sums up al-Sijistânî’s conception of nature by saying

that it is not being or physis, but that allows for the appearance of every
phenomenal existent.84 But this allowing for appearance is different than
the invariant World as we saw it in Heidegger and Badiou. For here this
appearance is tied directly to that which has no Being or essence, which
the World enthrones. Nature is then the condition for the appearance of
what is totally different from the World, for what is the messianity of crea-
tures rather than as worldly.
The solution to the impasse between analogical transcendence and
absolute immanence, where there can be no messianity, is then a concep-
tion of nature as clone of the Real-One. Instead of trying to conceive of the
relationship between the Absolute—God and (hypostasized) Nature—
which requires then some epistemological organon of selection, foreclose
the One to thought as that which is beyond Being and Alterity, but which
manifests itself as lived in-Person. In terms whose meaning is more directly
understandable, instead of treating Deus sive natura as a relation between
two terms, treat the equation as itself relative to the radical autonomy of
the Real-One. This radicalizes the Spinozist response to the Thomist fail-
ure of selection, for instead of selecting the whole of nature as the best way
to think God, the non-theologian selects the whole of the dyad of God and
nature in order to think the cloned One.
Jambet shows how this conception of nature is dependent on being
thought from the paradoxical One of Ismaili Islam. Thus al-Sijistânî’s con-
ception is helpful for our theory of nature because it moves thinking from
the perspective of Being to a thinking in-One. Ismaili Islam, whether or not
Laruelle himself knows this, appears as a kind of proto-non-philosophical
conception of the One, though couched in terms of a radical transcen-
dence rather than a radical immanence. Yet the formalism of the One, as
discussed in chapter 6, can be seen “in-person” so to speak when we think
it alongside of the Ismaili experience of liberty, which was actually lived
in the proclamation of the time of Resurrection (qiyâmat) in the twelfth
century, after the collapse of their Fatimid caliphate that ruled over the
Islamic world.85 The story of the Ismailis of Alamût is fascinating and
should be of interest to anyone interested in messianism, but the historical
details are not of particular interest here.86 Rather, it is the relationship
between this messianic act and the One that is important. Jambet explains
this necessary connection and mutation of the Neoplatonic One and the
messianic act in Ismaili thought writing:
It is no less suggestive to note, in these two cases, the following philosophi-

cal fact: in order to problematize a messianic event, whether it be a fervent
premonition or already experienced, it is necessary to interrogate the nature
of the One, the nature of the procession of existants, and also to interpret
the messianic event according to the laws of engendering the multiple from
the One. Why was this theoretical schema so necessary?
It seems to us that there are two simple enough reasons for this. First
and foremost, the neo-Platonic schema of the One and the multiple permits
the One to be situated beyond any connection with the multiple wherein
it would be totalized or counted as one. The One is thought beyond the
unified totality of its emanations in the multiple. On the other hand, freed
from any link with the totality of the existant, and situated beyond Being,
the One can signify pure spontaneity, a liberty with no foundation other
than itself. In this way, the sudden messianic appearance of the Resurrector
will be founded in the creative liberty of the originary One; thus, in the
necessary reign of the existent, the non-Being that results from the excess of
the One will be able to mark out its trail of light.
But, conversely, this creative spontaneity will also explain the creation of
the existent, the ordained and hierarchized formation of universes. Just as
much as with the unjustified liberty, the One will be able to justify the pro-
cession of the intelligible and sensible, and the gradation of the spiritual and
bodily worlds. Avoiding dualism, all while thinking the duality between
the One and the order of Being which it interrupts; conceiving, on the other
hand, of the unity of order and creative spontaneity—all while preserving
the dualist sentiment—without which the experience of messianic liberty
was impossible: this is what neo-Platonic thought offered to the Ismaili.87
In short, the One allows the Ismaili to think the pure formalism of the
Real—there is the non-thetic transcendence found in the negation of
Being, interrupting the order of Being and beings, and the immanence of
(non-)One or the existant that is beyond any totality, that is pure fissure
itself.
The immanental aspect of the Real-One, which is carried in each One,
simply cannot be reduced to a totality, to some kind of idea of number. It
exists without any ground whatsoever, and this is its source of liberty or
autonomy from any attempt to capture it within philosophical or theologi-
cal structures:
The Ismaili experience of liberty is not the discovery of the autonomy of

consciousness or the political rights of the individual. It is the feeling of a
different and powerful idea: liberty is not a moment of Being, and it is even
less a piece in the game of the existent. Liberty is not an attribute, but rather
a subjective affirmation without foundation. Liberty is not a multiple effect
of the One, but it can be nothing but the One, disconnected from whatever
network of constraints it engenders or by which, on the contrary, it would
come to be seized. Liberty is the experience of this non-Being of the One,
through which the One inscribes itself in the universe of both Being and
beings as pure alterity.88
This reveals something important about the identity of immanence: imma-

nence has no ground and is thus, in some real sense, the other to any form of
thinking that searches for a transcendental or absolute ground from which
to think. Immanence itself is fissured, it itself is the Real-One and thus
every real thing is in-immanence and is immanence-in-the-last-identity.
Not as subsumed into immanence as absolute substance, but as lived. This
Ismaili One of absolute liberty as already-cloned from the Real-One will
provide the necessary material for thinking a non-theological nature from
this radical immanence.
What are the consequences of this choice? What does this choice do?
And how, finally, does it think a messianism of nature?
Nature is no longer an object of knowledge nor is it the object of knowl-

edge that comes to know itself, but itself is the inconsistent condition for
any such dialectic. As inconsistent it can surprise the creatural subjects
of nature, rather than providing their sékommça cage. As such it is itself
outside of any of this dialectic as radical immanence underlying the tran-
scendental dialectic. Nature is the identified with the Earth rather than
with the World. As al-Sijistânî says, nature does not change state. Even
if its parts were to be annihilated, it would still remain as nature, as the
condition for the appearance of the messiah as divine potential.89 Worlds
may pass away, but their appearance and passing away depends on the
Earth. Even when the Earth does pass away, nature as such will remain as
already-inherent and already-manifest.
This divine potential is ultimately an antinaturalism, one that can be
explored and explained through a somewhat unlikely detour of the French
Maoist angelology of Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet. For the figure
of the Angel in their work is an attempt to negate this unacknowledged
and hallucinatory thinking of nature as bound to law through a neces-
sity of arrival or advent of the Angel. The Angel is a pure negative name.
Lardreau writes in the introduction of their L’Ange:
It is necessary that the Angel come. And so that he comes, being invisible,
he must have been visible in his works, he must have been announced in
history, he must have been there, not two objects of desire, that is where
the Fathers were lost, but two desires. Or rather, a desire, that is to say a
sexual desire, and a desire that has nothing to do with sex, not even the
desire for God: rebellion. On the one hand pleasure, jouissance, and on the
other not even beatitude. Something still unnamed, that we have called
desire under the pressure of language, which we must force into delivering
a name to us. But the Angel is anonymous, or polynymous. We only call
it that by way of negative metaphors. That’s how pseudo-Dionysius wants
to speak about that which is God. Negative theology. Speaking about the
world before the break from which it will be born, we can say nothing
except from the negative. I do not see how else to hold on to the hope of
revolution.90
L’Ange is partly a polemic against the “revolutionaries of desire” (they dis-

cuss very briefly Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari) in ways that prefigure
the now popular criticisms of Slavoj Žižek and Malcolm Bull. Namely,
the revolution of desire is fully compatible with capitalism; it doesn’t over-
throw the Master but replaces him with a new form of the Master.91 I’m
not interested in either responding to this critique or in defending it; in
fact, it often seems to me that L’Ange suffers from a certain inchoate rage
directed at thinkers with whom they share a minimal difference. What is
interesting to me is how this antagonism toward Lyotard and Deleuze and

Guattari manifests as an antinaturalism in Jambet and Lardreau.
For Jambet and Lardreau naturalism and antinaturalism is the differ-
ence between two different forms of revolution. This dualistic theory of
revolution is explored in the central chapter of L’Ange, written by Lardreau,
entitled “Lin Piao comme volonté et représentation” [Lin Biao as Will and
Representation]. There they posit yet another gnostic separation, this time
between ideological revolution and the absolute revolt of cultural revolu-
tion.92 This dualism isn’t completely foreign to more familiar and popular
forms of contemporary Marxism, like that found in Antonio Negri who
traces revolutions in terms of the difference between constituted power
and constitutive power. Like Negri in this respect Lardreau and Jambet are
concerned with uncovering how it is that pure revolt against the Master
behind every master, which is cultural revolution, becomes ideological
revolution, a form of revolution that merely makes possible a new mas-
ter as it is tied directly to historical processes such as a new dominant
mode of production.93 In this chapter Lardreau undertakes an empirical
case study of this dualistic struggle between the different forms of revo-
lution by locating a form of cultural revolution in the early irruption of
Christian ascetic monasticism and its accommodation within the church.
This early monastic movement is a form of cultural revolution just as the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China is one.94 This was
a form of life that, even if it was called Christian, had nothing to do with
the worldly church of institutional Christianity that helped to found the
“institution” of Europe. Instead, as a form of cultural revolution, it “pre-
sented itself as an anti-culture, a calculated inversion, systematic, of all
the values of this world.”95 In fact Lardreau locates three essential themes
of cultural revolution as an extreme path of “struggle alone”: “the radi-
cal rejection of work, the hatred of the body, and the refusal of sexual
difference—certainly not as a production of one indifferent sex or of n
sexes [ . . . ] but as the abolition of sex itself.”96
Thus cultural revolution is “totally contra-nature.”97 This has two dif-
ferent but connected meanings. First, it may mean the rejection of the idea
that what is simply is. This is the form of nature that we located already at
work in both the Christian theological tradition and contemporary natu-
ralism. It is nature as the sékommça; nature as the “it’s like that.”98 The
second meaning has to do with death. The hatred of the fleshly body and
the desire (for, whatever Jambet and Lardreau say, this is a desire even
if it is, like Job, cried forth as a protest) for the subtle or spiritual body
can give birth to the messianic act (what we may name as the coming
of Christos Angelos or the Future Christ).99 As Jambet writes later in his
career when he locates the messianic act of the Ismaili community of the
Alamut mountain fortress in their overturning of the Law in the name of

a liberty found in living the higher life of contemplating the divine: “The
abolition of the law means we replace it as series of distinct obligations by
a single one, which is that of the sabbath.”100 In other words, one lives the
life of one divine rather than the life of survival.
Now in part we find a hatred in Jambet and Lardreau for nature
because they too confuse nature with the World. Such hatred, Laruelle
says, ends in “so many vicious circles and tendencies” that “mistake the
whole of the phenomenon” for “the heretical struggle is not born from
terror or the specular-whole, which it practically undoes, it is born from
the being-separate of man that is in-Man.”101 Yet, more radically than
Spinoza’s offer of salvation as reconciliation with an indifferent nature,
Laruelle suggests that salvation comes by way of gnosis. Gnosis knows that
“the divine creation—the World—is a failure,” but also that “the necessity
for salvation is universal.”102 If the choice is really between the authority
of the World (as Nature) or an arbitrary but absolute will of the people (as
contra-nature) captured or manifested in State power become barbaric,
then there is no real choice. In each instance the human, or Man-in-Man
in Laruelle’s terminology, is turned into a subject (which is the (non-)One),
but its real identity, which produces this subject as the inconsistent imma-
nence of the One, is obscured within an idea of humanity given from an
authority. And in each case we never stop rebelling, human beings never-
theless rebel, Man is in-struggle. Laruelle puts it this way, “There is revolt
rather than only evil; nearly everywhere and always people do not cease
to kill but they also rebel against the most violent powers as the most
gentle.”103
In Laruelle’s work the name of the subject who is in-struggle is Christ.
For Laruelle’s non-philosophy the subject is produced as an effect of
the radical immanence of Man or the Human. Thus in this case the
Christ-subject may be the masses. Laruelle recognizes this when he writes
(as we’ve already quoted in chapter 7), “The Future Christ rather signifies
that each man is a Christ-organon, that is to say, of course, the Messiah,
but simple and unique once each time. This is a minimal Christianity.
We the Without-religion, the Without-church, the heretics of the future,
we are, each-and-everyone, a Christ or Messiah.”104 It is in the positive
religions that Christ is misunderstood: “Christianity is the limit, the whole
content of which is a misinterpretation of Christ”105 A student of Laruelle’s,
Gilles Grelet, goes further and connects Christ with Jambet and Lardreau’s
Angel, by separating a “marshmallow” Christ (“The marshmallow offers
the perfect image of relation between the ‘fundamentally Christian’ West
and Christ, since we know that the soft and very sweet candy does not, in
fact, contain any marsh mellow.”) from the Christos Angelos (“Angel of all
the angels, the Gnostic Christ is the Envoy charged with delivering men
from their enslavement in this world by liberating in them the knowledge
of their origin and the means of getting back to the place from which
they have been exiled: Christos Angelos frees by the knowledge which gives
men the means of rebellion that they are, against all humility, fundamen-
tally driven by.”).106 So in order to understand Christ as generic subject we
must understand him as radically separate from Christianity. What better
way to do considering Christ from the perspective of a Gnostic-Islamic
Christology as present in Ismaili thought?107
Non-Philosophy is a practice of liberty from philosophy, from the struc-
ture of the World, and not an account of foundation and is thus messianic.
By taking the relatively transcendent pole of the fourfold and negating the
veiling and absence of the dyad of God or nature, we are able to free the
earth from unmessianic divinities. This choice then gives us a conception
of nature that unifies a scientific stance toward nature as the One of what
appears and the condition of that appearing and an ancient philosophical
problem of nature that has all too often ended in a conception of an over-
determining nature. Nature, in this middle place between the One and the
Future Christ as Resurrector, does not provide any of the usual limitations
to human and creatural liberty. Nothing in this conception is “unnatural,”
for nature is itself perverse here. As the condition for the appearance of
messianity of the human and other creatures it stands against what simply
is, against the sékommça. And it is ultimately here, when nature can be
turned against the natural, that we see the unified theory of messianism
and nature. Yes, let everyone say with Jambet and Lardreau “let the Angel
come!” but understand that the Angel can only come to the earth; it can
only overturn the World by overturning the absoluteness of both Being
and Alterity. For the earth, like the Angel, has no Master and is everywhere
and always already in revolt.
Conclusion
Theory of Nature
A Tripartite Theory of Nature in-One
The ideas sketched in the chapters in this book are simple materials.
Understood under the immanental ecology put forth in chapter 9, aspects
may be extracted from their ecosystem and put into a relationship with
other materials. By way of a conclusion I will now present a theory of
the identity of nature constructed from these materials. I remind the
reader of the ending that we already gave away in the introduction, for
this theory of nature understands the creatural as subject of nature, the
chimera of God or Nature as non-thetic transcendence of nature, and
the One as radical immanence of nature. In that same introduction I
claimed that this theory would come to have a determinate meaning by
the end of the book and indeed what has thus far been discussed has been
necessary for the production of this theory. For this theory of nature has
grown out of the ecosystems (of) thought studied in the last chapter by
way of a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology (which is,
of course, itself part of an ecosystem (of) thought as well) developed in
part III. This unified theory would not have been possible without the
reconception of the division of labor between philosophy and science that
Laruelle constructed in his non-philosophy as explained in part II, espe-
cially chapter 6. So, in this conclusion I will simply act as an ecologist of
thought. Ecologists are able to take people into a field and show them the
teeming drama of what seemed hidden before. I will do the same now for
this theory of nature.
The Creatural as Subject of Nature

Aquinas begins the second book of his Summa Contra Gentiles with a
defense of the subject matter of the book: creation. That Aquinas sees the
need to give such a defense suggests there would be some who would find
the subject of creatures inappropriate and even undignified for a theo-
logian; that is, the subject of creation is undignified for one concerned
with divine things. It should be unsurprising that Aquinas connects his
discourse on creatures with the overriding concern he has of forming a
nonanthropomorphic conception of God, of keeping the veiled under
cover. Subsequently it is concerned that metaphysics not erase God’s divin-
ity, while still opening up some way for creatures to know God. This is
because for Aquinas knowing God bestows on creatures real, though rela-
tive, dignity. According to Aquinas, the concern with creation is useful for
theology and the instruction of faith for four reasons. First, meditation
on God’s work of and in creation enables us to reflect and admire God’s
wisdom.1 Second, considering creation leads to an admiration of God’s
power.2 Third, it incites human souls to love God’s goodness.3 Last, it may
endow human beings with a certain likeness to God’s perfection insofar as
God knows everything through Godself.4 These reasons clearly separate
Aquinas’s philosophical theology of nature from the facile natural theology
of domestic design arguments like those of William Paley’s “Watchmaker
analogy.” In Aquinas the point of reflecting on nature is not to prove the
existence of God, but to disclose the character of God. This is paralleled
by a careful, though not labored, reading of Aquinas’s famous five proofs
for the existence of God. Such a careful reading bears out that Aquinas
himself thinks such arguments show the limits of “natural” reason to think
of God without revelation. In this vein Eugene F. Rogers writes, “Aquinas
sees his charge as a teacher of sacred doctrine in the presence of Aristotle as
a charge to consider nothing God-forsaken. That is the point, by the way, of
the Five Ways: to leave no human or physical motion unrelated to God.”5
Creation differs from pure naturalism in that what is at work in cre-
ation is a particular form of subjectivity. Note again Aquinas’s reasons for
defending a discussion of nature, for in each case it is a question of a sub-
ject relation to what is neither a subject nor an object as pure relational
veiling. Stepping away from Aquinas’s orthodox vocabulary and syntax
we can say that creation is a certain fiction produced by the Real. It is,
for that, no less part of reality, but it is such as a kind of mode of that
Real. The subjectivity of nature is creation or, in a more precise sense,
it is creatural. I use this term to avoid confusion with the act of creation
implied in the Scholastic separation of Creator, creation, and creatures.6
Conclusion 219
For what is meant by creation in Aquinas’s defense is not the act of cre-
ation, which belongs in his view to God alone as cause, but rather to the
whole of the effects of the act of that cause. The creatural is the realm of
effect. Standard contemporary forms of what could be termed “Speculative
Thomism” (a title that would apply to those who use Aquinas as Jacques
Maritain and John Milbank do, as well as, to a lesser extent, Michael
Northcott, who was discussed in chapter 4), in an attempt to safeguard
Thomism and the humiliation of creatures it produces in its apophaticism
of nature, might object that I have made a category error here. Rather than
bestowing creatures with subjectivity, they could suggest, all subjectivity,
at least all real subjectivity, is retained for God. But this is exactly what
reveals the unmessianic character of Thomism, its deep connection with
secular naturalism and a worship of the sékommça. While the messianity
of creatures might seem like it could only be taken on faith, it is supported
by the loop of analogy that, without any organon of selection, constantly
loops upon itself producing this same sékommça. It also opens up to the
mistakes of positing some pure nature, which is anathema to these same
Speculative Thomists, but which they are unable to avoid when they insist
on the lack of positive existence for nature as creatures. Creatures, how-
ever, are always in the midst of fabulating messianity.
The creatural as subject of nature is expressed in the ecological concepts
of niche and biodiversity (chapter 9). For each of these is a fiction, or what
Bergson and Deleuze call a fabulation, a kind of story as effect of the One
that produces Being and Alterity. It is important that this notion of fabula-
tion not be confused with something unreal or even with Husserl’s irreal.
But the fabulation is the radical immanence of nature as One, a radical
immanence that is the lived bodily existence beyond transcendence of a
creature. Yet, importantly, this fabulation is created without there being a
reciprocal effect on the radical immanence of that Real-One. For there is
a finitude at work in the creatural. No creature is eternal within the orga-
nization fabulated into the World, yet each manifests as in-One and thus
is nature-in-person. When someone appeals to save creation, to save the
creatural, what they are appealing to is the salvation of the subject, of this
particular finite fiction that is how the earth or biosphere is lived. Again,
such a fiction is real, but is real as an effect of the Real and is thus said to
be in-One.
Treating creation as a population (of) thought we are able to remove
it from the wider system. This system is entrenched in Being as such, but
by removing it from the Greek and Christian ontological system, a goal of
non-philosophy in general as discussed in chapter 5, we are able to move
beyond the infinite loop of analogy. Here, where the creatural is the name
of nature’s subjectivity, there is no absolute apophaticism of creation in
the name of the Creator’s lone claim to Being used to chain and treat the
creatural as nothing. Rather analogy can come to function as a kind of
energy that is exchanged between and connects various creatures to one
another in terms of fabulative likeness. That is, rather than a complete
rejection of anthropomorphism, we can begin to think of the relative anal-
ogies between human beings and other creatures as an effect of the Real.
The complete rejection of anthropomorphism is a commonality between
theologians and radical ecotheorists, which even seeps into more popular
“Green” discourse. But this actually ends up putting a barrier between
human beings and other creatures as it sets up the old division between
humans and Nature. Human beings are part of the biosphere, they are
natural, and as such there are things in nature that have the form [morphe]
of human beings. That form will have commonalities with other creatures,
while of course having limits as well, but by thinking this kind of relative
analogy between creatures, creative of not just anthropomorphism but also
arbormorphism or elephamorphism. This relative form of analogy is pro-
ductive of an inconsistent and open ethic. Such an ethic operates through
the direction of attention to the suffering and exile common to all crea-
tures. This ethic of attention needs no other reason than their existence to
care for others. By way of a certain productive analogy of beings with the
human we can begin to change our attention. But this attention is always
guarded from being misdirected from suffering by way of a recognition of
its ungrounded character as a fabulation. Thus, when we speak of the bees
and think of them democratically (for this is closer to the actual organiza-
tion of bees than monarchy), we are free to do so in terms of a mass crea-
tural subject that includes the human alongside of the bee, but we do not
move from there away from this to a conception of the Real as such.
Chimera of God or Nature as Non-Thetic

Transcendence of Nature
I can think of two exquisite ethical examples of such a fabulation discussed
earlier, though there are surely a multitude in the liminal space between
philosophical theology and literature. The first, likely familiar to our read-
ers, are the numerous stories surrounding St. Francis of Assisi and his rela-
tionship with animals. St. Francis was able to call all aspects of creation his
brothers and sisters, not as an allegory, but as truly sharing in the likeness
of a gift to Christ or the Messiah.7 The other can be found in Epistle 22
of the tenth-century Islamic esoteric secret society based in Basra, Iraq,
and that went under the name of Ikhwan al-Safa or the Brethren of Purity
Conclusion 221
whom many in Ismaili Islam claimed was the “Hidden Imam” or, again,
the Messiah. This epistle, translated into English under the title The Case
of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, details a protest made
by the animals against humanity and their violence against them because
of their belief “that the animals were their runaway and rebellious slaves.”8
Here we can see that in messianic traditions, albeit ones confusing radi-
cal immanence with an absolute transcendence, there is already a move-
ment toward this kind of open and inconsistent ethic of attention toward
the creatural, rather than the toward closed-species or what could even be
called the family, if taken in an enlarged sense.
The Aesopian element at work in theological and philosophical fables
like this fascinated Spinoza. For this Aesopian element is a version of the
general issue of metamorphosis, which fascinated Spinoza because once he
defined substance as being singular it seemed to him that we could then
think of bodies changing to such an extent they may not be considered to
be of the same nature as they were before. This in turn had important phil-
osophical consequences for thinking through what happens to a human
being in the change from infancy to adulthood.9 This interest in meta-
morphosis, really in what could be termed the supernatural, goes deeper
than a passing literary fancy for Spinoza, for it lies at the heart of the strat-
egy of the chimera discussed in the previous chapter. That strategy of the
chimera is of special interest to us when it creates the impossible equation
of God, or nature. Remember how Zourabichvili defines the chimera as
“whose nature veils [enveloppe] an open contradiction” and that which “by
its nature, cannot exist,” going on to write that “[t]he chimera is not a thing
but, if we can put it this way, a non-thing, a non-nature.”10
Here what we find is a conception of nature that is expressed as
non-thetic transcendence or what has been expressed as the non(-One)
in Laruelle. Though it seems oblique, it refers to “the real kernel of tran-
scendence” or rather transcendence understood as an effect of the radical
immanence of the One.11 As such it is a transcendence that is produced as
an effect of transcendence and yet gives itself nonreflexively as the support
for philosophical and theological thinking. A thetic statement is tautolo-
gous, like A = A, and as such fuses the idea of the posited and positing.
Paradoxically, then, even a thetic statement is a kind of chimera, an impos-
sible equation like God = nature. The power of a thetic statement lies in
the fact that they locate an identity outside of relativity and so do not take
into account the directionality of thought. Consider that if a river were
to suddenly reverse course, like the Chicago River was forced to do by
civil engineering in 1887, it does not cease being a river even though that
change in course radically alters its ecological make-up. What is non-thetic
about this transcendence is that it is relationally determined while also
transcending those relations. By locating a non-thetic form of transcen-

dence in God or nature we show that this equivocation, this chimera, is
constructed or fabulated even as it is constitutive of thought, as discussed
in chapter 7.
Nature, with the capital N, is thus unveiled in this theory of nature
through its cynical or chimerical equivocation with God. What is required
for thinking is a fiction of ground that is ultimately ungrounded itself.
Thus to see Nature as a veiled open contradiction (a hypostasized Nature)
is one identifying it as a chimera. This opens up to thinking the remain-
der produced by this transcendence as a kind of nature that is no longer
recognizable on the terms required by philosophy and theology. This view
of Nature is no longer a threat, as we saw in chapter 10 it is for Latour and
Morton, but disempowered as part of the fabric of thinking that, while
transcending thought as such, is always at play within thought and part
and parcel of the practice of thinking. Ecology may not need this notion
of Nature for its own scientific practice, but it comes to be a certain kind
of never-living aspect of philosophy productive of other thoughts. Thus,
one may still develop a thinking of Nature, but such a thought is able to
show that in all the various philosophical and theological constructions of
Nature they are taking something produced as an effect of radical imma-
nence for the absolute. By seeing this as a fiction, albeit one at the founda-
tion of a certain kind of thinking, worldly Nature is freed to be nature
separate from the World (as discussed in chapter 11) and thus to be at play
with creatural nature rather than overdetermining it.
The One as Radical Immanence of Nature:

Or, How Nature Is a Name for the Real
The One of both Ismaili Islam and non-philosophy is not a unified total-
ity. It is not numerical in any reductive sense. Instead, Laruelle calls upon
this ancient philosophical and theological transcendental to characterize
the Real as prior (he will say “without priority”) to Being and Alterity.
In the same way the Ismaili called upon the One as a way to think a lib-
erty with no other foundation except for itself. The One is simply radical
immanence, the experience of something prior to the World at work in
the Real.
When I first embarked on this philosophical research into ecology,
begun largely as a conversation between Husserlian phenomenology and a
Bergsonian and Deleuzian understanding of the immanence of nature, I
began making the claim that the earth is prior to the World. As a rhetorical
Conclusion 223
strategy and in relation to the fourfold I still think this phrase works, but
it is more rigorously expressed as the One is prior to the World. The reason
that the earth isn’t a proper name for the Real within a unified theory of
philosophical theology and ecology is because the earth is actually part
of a wider relationality for its identity or, in other words, it is an effect
of nature. There is a kind of reversibility at work, as we say in chapters 8
and 9, between the earth and the flows of energy and material that make it
up, to the degree that the earth really is but a name for a certain organiza-
tion as One. In the same way the oceans and the atmosphere could also
be said to be prior to the World, but only because they too are a certain
organization as One.
So what does it mean to claim the One as the radical immanence of
nature? It is very different from the naturalisms and materialisms of phi-
losophy presented in chapter 2. Rather, the answer to this is found in
thinking together the lived subjective experience of nature as creatural as
well as its non-thetic transcendence as Nature as produced by this radical
immanence. For the radical immanence of nature as One unifies these two
modes of nature. As a creature I experience nature in-person as my body.
This is true of the lived experience of my body (of which I see no reason to
separate mind, since body is here taken in the sense of an effect rather than
a reductive materialist definition). For as a creatural body I am a certain
ecological organization of matter and energy. I produce in an ecological
sense. Yet, there is also a transcendent element at work in my experience
of this body in the sense that there is something separate from me, tran-
scending in a relative sense, that I may also call nature. I think of the way
an affliction, genetically coded, like gout, may suddenly come upon my
body and change my bodily relations, physical and mental, with the rest of
creatural nature. And yet, in the immediacy of practice and experience, I
don’t take this transcending ailment as a parameter set by Nature. That is
a secondary move and even a poor fabulation. Rather, what I can fabulate
as a creature, like Spinoza, is a cynical equivocation that locates within this
same transcending Nature the site of the appearance of the Messiah or a
great number of potentialities achieved on this body. So, within creatural
nature there are others who offer me help. Still others who create medicines
or research into the phenomenon and provide new knowledge about what
to do. So in the midst of this Nature, already disempowered for us now,
we see the appearance of love and charity. We may also see violence, but
such violence is always struggled against (as has already been discussed in
chapters 7 and 9).
Thus the Unicity of nature as One is not something that shall be
thought, if by this we aim to circumscribe and affect nature as One. For
that is impossible and only hallucinates either nature as subject or Nature
as non-thetic transcendence in the place of radical immanence. Rather this

radical immanence of nature is known simply as the unconcealed prior to
knowledge. It can’t be known philosophically or theologically, but only
through a kind of faithfulness as struggle. Is this the same faithfulness one
often finds in non-standard naturalists (I’m thinking of those forms of nat-
uralism that aren’t simply reductive, as in Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson,
and Whitehead) required by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra when he cried, “I
beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe
those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!”12 Perhaps, but only if the
“otherworldy hopes” is understood as every World that erases the radical
immanence of creatural life and death, that erases the radical immanence
of an ecosystem. In fact, the entire context of Nietzsche’s fidelity must
change. For his fidelity to the earth is a fidelity to the meaning that it shall
come to have after the Overman comes. Rather, fidelity to the Oneness of
nature in this case merely points to it being already unveiled and already
present as radically autonomous, even while thought itself is unable to think
this on the terms of thought. We may instead say that this non-theological
faithfulness mirrors the Ismaili faithfulness to the One: “There is a merg-
ing of radical apophaticism and the doctrine of epiphany here.”13
The question of naming the Real as nature thus speaks to a kind of fidel-
ity and even submission, though not to the sékommça of Nature or even
an already decided Real. The fidelity, however, is neither to some Other as
the Real. Nor of course is it to the self. Rather it is fidelity to the revealed
of the unrevealable, that which is revealed but which thought is incapable
of thinking as something it can reveal. Na īr al-Dīn ūsī, who developed a
summa of Ismaili thought by building on the work of al-Sijistânî, explains
the meaning of the title “infidel” or kafir in Arabic, “He is called kafir
because the word ‘ kufr ’ means ‘to cover up’, meaning that he has concealed
from himself what he cannot know.”14 In other words, for the Ismaili as for
the non-philosopher, the act of infidelity is to cover up that upon which
thought runs aground, it is to stop thinking at the limits of thought, even
to simply accept the absolute or divinity. This is the impetus for Ismaili
messianism surrounding their hope in the Resurrector, which ultimately is
the name of the paradoxical One. Jambet explains that
it is impossible to name the paradoxical One. This impossibility immedi-

ately implies the necessity to name: that which we can say, we must say.
That is why the Resurrector’s name offers itself to the naming of what is
above and beyond the names. As the Real is indescribable and not demon-
strable, it is necessary to grasp it, not in itself as such, but in the mani-
festation of the primordial origination of the human locus of the Divine
Imperative, the Resurrector.15
Conclusion 225
The one who is faithful names from within the midst of the cage natu-
ralism attempts to put around creatures with its sékommça. It does so by
merging the radical apophaticism productive of creatural subjectivity with
the epiphany of radical immanence productive of a chimerical transcen-
dence. One is faithful when one submits to the One, which is a promiscu-
ous fidelity. Again following the Ismaili this is not a legalistic submission,
as if here we must submit to “laws of nature” and the limits it places on
human beings.16 Rather it is a submission to nature as name of the Real,
not as simple Power, but as knowledge and recognition of the freedom
inherent in radical immanence and productive of subjectivity. This allows
us to create a better fabulation of Nature and its relation to creatural sub-
jects, a fabulation that is able to find a joy in creating a different way of
living as creatures, respecting what may be called limits, but which turns
them into something other than negations. We turn nature into a first
name of the Real because this changes a hallucinatory, philosophical, and
theological Nature that loves to hide into a nature that, while foreclosed
to thought, reveals itself in our experience of the everyday. Ontology and
ethics are not treated separately here, for this form of nature as the Real,
as a radical immanence that we ourselves are the lived subjects of, requires
a kind of submission in the form of a certain kind of knowledge, a gnosis
that is salvation from the fabled war between humanity and nature. For
both are rootless. Both are abstract. Both are exiled such that home itself is
always something stranger than it seems.
Notes
Introduction
1. François Laruelle, Introduction au non-marxisme (Paris: PUF, 2002), p. 40.
1 Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse
1. François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul

Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), p. xxvi.
2. For a history of the various meanings this phrase has taken on from its incep-
tion in Heraclitus to Heidegger’s ontology, see Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis:
An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (London and
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
3. Ibid., pp. 7–14, 101–137, 155–229.
4. Philip Goodchild calls this a clash between economy and ecology. See Philip
Goodchild, “Oil and Debt—the Collision between Ecology and Economy,”
Situation Analysis, 2 (Spring 2003): 5–18.
5. Timothy Morton makes this point well when writing, “We can no longer
have that reassuringly trivial conversation about the weather with someone in
the street, as a way to break the ice or pass the time. The conversation either
trails off into a disturbingly meaningful silence, or someone mentions global
warming. The weather no longer exists as a neutral-seeming background
against which events take place. When weather becomes climate—when it
enters the realms of science and history—it can no longer be a staged set”
(The Ecological Thought [London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010], p. 28).
6. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles trans. A. C. Pegis, James F.
Anderson, Vernon J. Bourke, and Charles J. O’Neil, 4 vols. (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), II/4.1. [Hereafter SCG. Citations
refer to chapter and section. Volumes will be indicated by roman numerals.]
7. Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne
and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 10.
228 Notes
8. Ibid., pp. 10, 13. Nancy K. Levene argues persuasively that Spinoza trans-
forms and expands the meaning of revelation to something universal, rather
than something held within a particular religion. See her Spinoza’s Revelation:
Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
9. Within the scope of this work, specifically in the chapters collected under
part I, the majority of the theology dealt with will be Christian, largely
Roman Catholic, and while there are important reasons to consider Islamic,
Jewish, or other forms of theology at greater length, I nonetheless limit myself
and consider this a necessary limitation due to time and space. However,
Islamic theology comes to have a privileged place in part IV.
2 Ecology and Thought
1. This understanding of ecosystem is faithful to the mature formulation by

A. G. Tansley in 1935. See A. G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational
Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16.3 (1935): 299–303. See also Christian
L évêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere (Plymouth, UK: Science
Publisher, Inc.), pp. 25–27. I am deeply indebted to my colleague and friend
Prof. Liam Heneghan of DePaul University’s Institute for Nature and Culture
for the concept of the “never-living” and his help in understanding the con-
cept of ecosystem more fully.
2. For one account of the history of the development of the ecosystem con-
cept, see L évêque, Ecology, pp. 15–35. For a longer, more explicitly histori-
cal account, see Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept
in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1993). I will return to the ecosystem explicitly in part III.
3. L évêque, Ecology, p. 27.
4. Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 25.
5. We use the term “image” throughout this section to refer to what Botkin calls
at different times models, images, and concepts. By consistently referring to
these as images or images of thought we mean to create a connection between
these images as dogmatically determinate on the practice of ecological science
in a similar way as the dogmatic image of thought was shown to determine
philosophy by Gilles Deleuze in his Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul
Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), Chapter 3.
6. Botkin provides more historical detail on each image than I do and I refer the
reader to his book for the historical specificities of each image. For a fuller
picture of the ideas and attitudes toward nature, but without the connection
to ecological practices, the reader should also consult Peter Coates, Nature:
Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
7. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, pp. 75–89.
Notes 229
8. Coates does discuss some theological themes within the specificity of the
attitude toward nature in the Middle Ages. This, however, is limited in that
Coates does not connect these themes to actual scientific practices. See Coates,
Nature, pp. 40–66.
9. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, p. 82.
10. Ibid., p. 87.
11. Ibid., pp. 91–99.
12. Ibid., p. 93.
13. Ibid., p. 92; emphasis, as always unless noted, in original.
14. Ibid., p. 98.
15. Ibid., p. 99.
16. Ibid., pp. 101–110.
17. Ibid., p. 103.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 109.
20. Cf. Ibid., p. 108.
21. Ibid., pp. 113–131, 133–151.
22. Ibid., p. 120.
23. Cf. Ibid., pp. 125–127.
24. Ibid., p. 136.
25. Ibid., pp. 146–147.
26. Ibid., p. 151.
27. Ibid., p. 110.
28. See Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity,
2007), pp. 48–57. There he suggests that this passion is what differentiates
the twentieth century from preceding ones, a claim that would suggest my
drawing on this notion to explain images of thought from prior centuries is
misplaced, but his own claim is undercut by calling on forebearers for this
passion such as Hegel.
29. Ecology has taken great pains to legitimate its scientific character, though
against doubts cast upon it by the wider scientific community because of its
ties with political issues. The question of the relationship between environ-
mentalism or political and scientific ecology is an interesting one with regards
to this legitimation crisis. See L évêque, Ecology, pp. 3–4, 8–9.
3 Philosophy and Ecology
1. Some anecdotal evidence for this majority position of ethics and aesthetics can
be had by comparing the amount of Google hits one gets, at least in August
of 2009, for “environmental ethics” (about 1,180,000) and “environmental
aesthetics” (about 26,900) compared to “ecological metaphysics” (241) and
“metaphysics of ecology” (9). (Out of curiosity I reran this search in June of
2011 as I was preparing to submit the final version of my thesis and found that
230 Notes
all had increased by nearly double. “Environmental ethics” then had about
2,250,000 hits, followed by about 64,800 for “environmental aesthetics,”
while “ecological metaphysics” had about 468 and “metaphysics of ecology”
jumped to about 336. As of December 2012 these numbers had increased
again, though not as dramatically.) Both environmental ethics and environ-
mental aesthetics also have entries in the major encyclopedias of philosophy,
whereas ecological metaphysics does not. Further to this anecdotal evidence
there is a major journal dedicated to environmental ethics (Environmental
Ethics), but there is a complete absence of a journal that focuses on the meta-
physics of ecology. Even the more far-reaching Journal of Environmental
Philosophy tends to focus on ethics and aesthetics (largely from a phenomeno-
logical perspective), while metaphysics figures very marginally.
2. Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 50–51.
3. Ibid., p. 51.
4. Ibid.
5. See Arne Naess, “Spinoza and Ecology,” Philosophia 7:1 (March 1977): 45–54.
6. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans.
David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 66, 67.
7. See Ibid., pp. 171–182.
8. Ibid., p. 36.
9. Ibid., p. 39.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 34.
12. Ibid., p. 27.
13. Cf. Ibid., p. 38.
14. Ibid., pp. 57, 57–63.
15. Ibid., pp. 26–28. Though it isn’t as if Naess is wrong here; since writing this
over two decades ago governments have not appeared to become any wiser.
16. Ibid., p. 41.
17. Ibid., p. 48.
18. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Chapter 1; and Quentin Meillassoux, After
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London and New York: Continuum, 2008), Chapter 1. It is quite pos-
sible that Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism, the idea that nearly all
post-Kantian philosophy suffers from an antirealism that holds matter and
some form of mind necessarily exist together, was developed after reading §46
of Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy:
An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970).
19. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 5.
20. Ibid., p. 6.
21. For his attack on meaning, see Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 239.
23. Ibid., p. 50.
Notes 231
24. Ted Toadvine makes the same argument regarding Nature and environmen-
tal sciences with special reference to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. See Ted
Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2009).
26. See ibid., p. 59.
27. Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Mediation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory
of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995), p. 144.
29. Ibid., p. 148.
30. Fink, Sixth Cartesian Mediation, p. 32.
32. Ibid., p. 175.
33. Ibid., pp. 113–114.
34. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans.
Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 38.
35. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 152.
38. I provide here just a sampling of the texts. Bruce V. Foltz’s Inhabiting the Earth:
Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (New Jersey:
Humanities Books, 1996) provides a study of Heidegger’s considerations of
the environment and nature. Toadvine’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature
does the same with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The edited collec-
tion Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, eds. Charles S. Brown and
Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), includes a
number of essays on particular phenomenologists, and a few, notably by David
Wood and John Llewelyn, on the general notion of an ecophenomenology,
but these both fail to engage with the ecosystem concept. There are a number
of books that engage with related ecological issues, including the edited col-
lection Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice,
eds. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2007), which considers different ideas of boundaries, human/
animal, living/dead, but does not include any essays that engage with the eco-
system concept. Brett Buchanan’s Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments
of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2008) provides an interesting study of the of protoecolo-
gist Jacob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt and the differing forms of
influence it had on Heidegger, Merelau-Ponty, and Deleuze, who of course
was not a phenomenologist. While this doesn’t provide much in the way of an
ecological philosophy, it does provide a resource for bridging the gap between
animal-philosophy and ecological philosophy. In terms of the structure we’re
tracing here, the limit of philosophy and science, none of these works moves
beyond the phenomenological drive to subsume science into itself. There is,
however, Robert Frodemen’s Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy
232 Notes
and the Earth Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003),
which is a work that, while sharing a different theoretical orientation, is in the
same spirit as this work. Instead of a unified theory of philosophical theology
and ecology Frodemen present a kind of unified theory of phenomenology
and geology. While his work is then not of particular use here, it does give wit-
ness to the perversity of nature and the infinite task of thinking from nature.
39. John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1991); and Seeing through God: A Geophenomenology (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004).
40. Llewelyn, Seeing through God , p. 22.
41. John Mullarkey makes this point about Llewelyn’s philosophy writing, “Each
and every being has a claim on me on account of the ‘that it is’ rather than
the ‘what it is’ of each; the ontological rather than the ontic. There need be
no qualitative similarity (having consciousness, sentience) between us, and
yet there remains an ethical responsibility all the same.” John Mullarkey,
“A Bellicose Democracy: Bergson on the Open Soul (or Unthinking the
Thought of Equality),” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New
Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion , eds. Anthony Paul Smith and
Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2010), p. 178.
42. Llewelyn, Seeing through God, p. 21.
43. On the status and use of the Gaia hypothesis within scientific ecology, see
Felix Baerlocher, “The Gaia Hypothesis—A Fruitful Fallacy,” Experientia
46.3 (1990): 232–238.
44. Meillassoux uses this phrase in his After Finitude, saying that contemporary
philosophy has forgotten the “great outdoors” and that he aims to mark a
return to it. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 7.
45. See Iain Hamilton Grant, “The ‘Eternal and Necessary Bond between
Philosophy and Physics’: A Repetition of the Difference between the Fichtean
and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities 10:1 (April 2005): 43–59.
46. Grant, “The ‘Eternal and Necessary Bond between Philosophy and Physics,’” 44.
47. Ibid., 46–47.
48. Ibid., 50.
49. For Žižek’s criticism of the ideology of ecology and his own attempt to recast
the problem of nature alongside of ecology, see “Unbehagen in der Natur,” in his
In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008). For Žižek’s indebt-
edness to Schelling, see his reading in Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder:
On Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York: Verso, 2007); and
for an account and criticism of that reading, see Iain Hamilton Grant, “The
Insufficiency of Ground: On Žižek’s Schellingianism,” in The Truth of Žižek, eds.
Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London and New York: Continuum, 2007),
pp. 82–98. For an interesting comparative study of Žižek’s and Heidegger’s
thoughts on nature, which argues that they share a vision of a fundamentally
not-whole nature, see Michael Lewis, Heidegger beyond Deconstruction: On
Nature (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), pp. 105–127.
Notes 233
50. See Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, pp. 189–231.

51. Ibid., p. 208.
52. Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New
York: Continuum, 2006), p. 194.
53. Grant, Philosophies of Nature, pp. 19–21. My understanding of Grant’s exten-
sity test, along with his reading of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and its
limits, is dependent on conversations with Daniel Whistler, who also con-
structed this block quote. See Daniel Whistler, “Language after Philosophy
of Nature: Schelling’s Geology of Divine Names,” in After the Postsecular and
the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, eds. Anthony
Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2010), pp. 335–359.
54. Grant, Philosophies of Nature, p. 20.
55. A philosopher that thinks along the same lines as Grant may respond to this
saying that we have fallen into a kind of philosophy of organics, like Fichte
and the neo-Fichteans that Grant identifies, but, as is clear from our discus-
sion of the formation of the ecosystem concept, the ecosystem concept is not
compromised in this neo-Fichtean forgetting of nature, of the never-living.
56. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 169.
57. L évêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere (Plymouth, UK: Science
Publisher, Inc., 2003), p. 4.
58. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 153.
59. “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 a science is that it is often difficult to elimi-
nate the particular point of view of the observer and to eliminate all value
judgements on the object of study” (L évêque, p. 4).
60. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, pp. 153–154.
61. Ibid., p. 154.
62. Ibid., p. 155.
4 Theology and Ecology
1. This is a concept I develop in relation to Laruelle’s non-philosophy and ques-

tions within the philosophy of religion. See my “What Can Be Done with
Religion?: Non-Philosophy and the Future of Philosophy of Religion,” in After
the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of
Religion, eds. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 280–298.
2. E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
234 Notes
3. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic

Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
1993), pp. 317–318, 320. Here Heidegger connects the forgetting of Being
with the concealment of the Earth in its presenting itself as “coal to be mined
and hauled.”
4. See Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian
Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 77–92, 153–188.
5. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4, trans. A. T. Mackay, T. H. L. Parker,
H. Knight, H. A. Kennedy, and J. Marks, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F.
Torrance (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004), p. 349. I’m indebted to
Jeremy Ridenour for a discussion about Barth and animals.
6. Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 227.
7. This insight is properly a non-philosophical one and comes from John
Mullarkey’s own non-philosophical study of film-philosophy, where he argues
from the insight: “There is always what one might call the ‘transcendental
choice of film’ at work in film-philosophy: by this I mean those (inadver-
tently) illustrative approaches that use particular films to establish a theoreti-
cal paradigm of what film is and how it works. Yet, such approaches already
make their selections of particular films or film elements (of plot over sound,
or framing over genre, and so on) in the light of the theory of film in question,
and are therefore circular” (John Mullarkey, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy
and the Moving Image [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008], p. 5).
8. Northcott, Environment and Christian Ethics, p. 83.
9. Ibid., pp. 1–32.
10. Ibid., p. 57.
11. Ibid., p. 61. Here he mentions some of the figures that the theologians we
cover under the inflection type are drawn to, such as Lovelock and Fritjof
Capra.
12. Ibid., p. 191.
13. Ibid., pp. 83–84.
14. Ibid., p. 57.
15. Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter, Caritas in veritate: Charity in Love
(Rome: St. Peter’s, 2009), 4; para 51. Available online: http://www.vatican
.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc
_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html (accessed June 13, 2010).
16. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (London: SCM
Press, 1993), p. 29. McFague, unlike Northcott, does not locate a golden age,
though she, unlike Ruether, does locate a prior age of “wilderness,” resistant
to dualisms, that gives her theology the shape of being formed a bit more by
the declension narrative than other theologians in the inflection type. See
ibid., p. 4.
17. Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, trans. Philip Berryman
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 8.
18. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth
Healing (London: SCM Press, 1992), p. 3.
Notes 235
19. Ibid.
20. McFague, Body of God, p. 29.
21. Ibid., p. 3.
22. Ibid.
23. Ruether, Gaia & God, p. 39.
24. Both Ruether and McFague make reference to the Gaia hypothesis. McFague
in relation to her understanding of ecology as concerned with “unity”
(McFague, Body of God , pp. 29–30) and Ruether introduces Lovelock very
early on (Ruether, Gaia & God, p. 4).
25. Leonardo Boff, Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm, trans. John
Cumming (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995), p. 10.
26. Ruether, Gaia & God, pp. 1–2.
27. Boff, Ecology and Liberation, pp. 9–12.
28. See McFague, Body of God , pp. 27–63; Ruether, Gaia & God, pp. 32–58; Boff,
Cry of the Earth, pp. 140–157.
29. Boff, Ecology and Liberation, pp. 43–45.
30. Boff, Cry of the Earth, p. 10.
5 Theory of the Philosophical Decision
1. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (New York and

London: Continuum 2006), p. 148.
2 . Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and
People in a Changing World (Washington and London: Island Press, 2006),
p. 145.
3. Cf. François Laruelle, En tant qu’Un: La « non-philosophie » expliquée aux
philosophes (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p. 253.
4. In one of his latest works Laruelle shows that he ascribes to “the communist
hypothesis,” as Alain Badiou has described it, when he marks an equivalency
between his long-standing theory of a democracy (of) thought and a com-
munism (of) thought: “The democracy of-the-last-instance could after all
be called ‘communism’—if subtracted from every historical instance just as
much as from spontanism, if the ‘common’ of communism was understood
as the generic, if communism was understood as the generic constant of his-
tory” (François Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences generiques [Paris: Pétra,
2008] pp. 98–99).
5. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 189.
6. Readers interested in Laruelle’s project may benefit from consulting
Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), as well as the works by
Brassier and Mullarkey to be discussed.
236 Notes
7. François Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie (Mardaga: Liege-Bruxelles,

1989), p. 17.
8. See François Laruelle, “Theory of Philosophical Decision,” in Philosophies
of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle
(London and New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 196–223; “Théorie de la
Décision philosophique,” in Les Philosophies de la difference. Introduction
Critique (Paris: PUF, 1986), pp. 213–240; and “Analytic of Philosophical
Decision,” in Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthoy
Paul Smith (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 215–233;
“Analytique de la Décision philosophique,” in Principes de la non-philosophie
(Paris: PUF, 1995), pp. 281–304.
9. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 123.
10. Ibid.
11. François Laruelle et al., Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie (Paris: Éditions
Kimé, 1998), p. 40. See also Taylor Adkins’s draft translation of this passage
and the rest of the Dictionnaire available online: http://nsrnicek.googlepages
.com/DictionaryNonPhilosophy.pdf. My own translation is modified from
that of Adkins.
12. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, pp. 122–127.
13. Laruelle, Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie, p. 40.
14. Cf. Erik del Bufalo, Deleuze et Laruelle. De la schizo-analyse à la non-philosophie
(Paris: Kimé, 2003), p. 34.
15. See Hugues Choplin, De la phénoménologie à la non-philosophie. Lévinas
et Laruelle (Paris: Kimé, 1997); and Hugues Choplin, L’espace de la pensée
française contemporaine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); Eric Mollet, Bourdieu et
Laruelle. Sociologie réflexive et non-philosophie (Paris: Éditions Petra, 2003);
Didier Moulinier, De la psychanalyse à la non-philosophie. Lacan et Laruelle
(Paris: Kimé, 1998); and Olivier Harlingue, Sans condition. Blanchot, la littéra-
ture, la philosophie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Patrick Fontaine, Platon autre-
ment dit (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); Gilbert Kieffer, Que peut la peinture pour
l’esthétique? (Paris: Éditions Petra, 2003); and Esthétiques non-philosophiques
(Paris: Kimé, 1996); Anne-Françoise Schmid, “Le problème de Russell,” in La
Non-philosophe des contemporains (Paris: Kimé, 1995), pp. 167–186.
16. Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin
Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” in Collapse III (Falmouth: Urbanomic,
2007), pp. 307–449. The transcript includes the four individual presenta-
tions by Brassier, Grant, Harman, and Meillassoux, and the discussion after
each. Hereafter we will simply refer to this work as “Meillassoux, ‘Speculative
Realism.’”
17. Cf. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 118.
18. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,
trans. Ray Brassier (New York and London: Continuum, 2008), p. 28.
19. I note in passing Brassier’s characteristically harsh appraisal of Laruelle where
he claims, “Laruelle’s writings have yet to inspire anything beyond uncritical
emulation or exasperated dismissal” (Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 118). Brassier
Notes 237
places the reader of Laruelle in a gilded cage here perhaps to present his own
reading of Laruelle as a critical use of non-philosophy, but this forecloses the
third possibility of attempting to understand and use non-philosophy. To
one who is hostile to Laruelle’s non-philosophy this may already look like
“uncritical emulation,” and though Brassier himself is passing judgment here,
he does not provide us with any metaphilosophy for judging what uncritical
emulation looks like. It is important to keep in mind, as I will try to show
later in the essay, that there is a difference here between method and con-
tent. One can “emulate” the method of non-philosophy and reject, even on
non-philosophical grounds, the content Laruelle constructs much as Brassier
himself does, albeit Brassier does so on standard philosophical grounds. My
own positive non-philosophical project will, for instance, take a very different
form from Laruelle’s humanism (or, rather, non-humanism) on the basis of
an understanding of nature that is neither purely Greek (cosmos, physis) nor
purely Jew (creation) and that does not aim to bring them together into some
kind of Christian Jew-Greek synthesis as World.
20. Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” p. 427.
21. Meillassoux defines the thing-in-itself as the thing “independently of its rela-
tion to me” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 1). He goes on from here to say “all
those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can
be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself” (p. 3).
22. Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” p. 419.
23. Cf. Laruelle, En tant qu’Un, p. 37.
24. Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie, p. 16.
25. Cf. Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, pp. 152–155; Les philosophies de la dif-
férence, pp. 169–172.
26. Bufalo, Deleuze et Laruelle, p. 17.
27. Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” pp. 417–419. The argument appears
popular and convincing among readers of Meillassoux, though it is far from
clear that these are also readers of Laruelle based on their presentation of his
work. Cf. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
(Melbourne: re:press, 2009), pp. 177–178.
28. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 128.
29. Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie, pp. 176–177.
30. François Laruelle, Théorie des identités. Fractalité généralisée et philosophie arti-
ficielle (Paris: PUF, 1992), p. 59.
6 The Practice and Principles of

Non-Philosophy
1. François Laruelle, personal communication, May 2, 2010. Waves and phases,
in the sense these words have within physics, become important concept in
his most recent Philosophie non-standard. Générique, quantique, philo-fiction
238 Notes
(Paris: Kimé, 2010). Even though Laruelle aims not to separate the practice
of non-philosophy from its material some of his books do develop the practice
of non-philosophy with more clarity and attention. His most recent book is to
be counted among these alongside of (in chronological order of original pub-
lication) Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy,
trans. Rocco Gangle (London and New York: Continuum, 2010); Philosophie
et non-philosophie (Mardaga: Liege-Bruxelles, 1989); Théorie des identités.
Fractalité généralisée et philosophie artificielle (Paris: PUF, 1992); Principles of
Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London and
New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Introduction au non-marxisme (Paris: PUF,
2000); and Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith
(London and New York: Continuum, 2010).
2. Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, p. 33; Principes de la non-philosophie
(Paris: PUF, 1995), pp. 38–39.
3. Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, p. 33; Principes de la non-philosophie, p. 39.
6. See the entry “Vision-en-Un (Un, Un-en-Un, Réel)” in Laruelle et al.,
Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie (Paris: Kimé, 1998), pp. 202–205.
7. Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie, p. 38.
9. “In philosophy, Marxism included, immanence is an objective, a proclama-
tion, an object, never a manner of thinking or a style” (Laruelle, Introduction
au non-marxisme, p. 40).
10. See Erik del Bufalo, Deleuze et Laruelle. De la schizo-analyse à la non-philosophie
(Paris: Kimé, 2003), p. 40.
11. Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, pp. 198–202; Les philosophies de la dif-
férence, pp. 215–219. See also Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, pp. 219–
223; Laruelle, Les philosophies de la différence, pp. 237–240 for an early formal
schema of the One. Cf. Laruelle, Dictionnare, pp. 202–205; and Principles
of Non-Philosophy, 119–146; Laruelle, Principes de la non-philosophie,
pp. 168–192.
14. Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, pp. 34–34; Principes de la non-philosophie,
pp. 40–41. I read the parentheses framing the “of ” to suggest that this is a
unified relationship between force and thought rather than one being primary
over the other. Thus the substantial meaning of the “of” is suspended. In my
own creation of the population (of) thought and ecosystem (of) thought I
make use of this parenthetical, recognizing as I do so that it can appear dis-
tracting and pretentious. I can only ask the reader’s charity in reading it as a
technical use of syntax that indicates this suspension.
15. See the entry “Force (de) pensée (sujet-existant-Étranger)” in Laruelle,
Dictionnaire, pp. 76–79.
16. Ibid., p. 77.
Notes 239
18. For other works in non-philosophy outside of Laruelle’s development, see

the bibliography of the other members of l’Organisation Non-philosophique
Internationale. Available online: http://www.onphi.net/biblio/auteurs.php
(accessed September 10, 2010).
19. François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, trans.
Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing,
2012), p. 45; François Laruelle, La Lutte et l’Utopie à la fin des temps philoso-
phiques (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2004), p. 43.
20. Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard, p. 135.
21. Ibid., p. 137.
22. Ibid.
23. Alain Badiou, “Mathematics and Philosophy: The Grand Style and the
Little Style,” in Theoretical Writings, eds. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto
Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 17; emphases mine.
24. Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New
York: Continuum, 2006), p. 17.
25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), pp. 33, 37.
26. Ibid., p. 42.
27. Ibid., p. 161.
28. Laruelle, Théorie des identités, p. 56.
29. Ibid., p. 57.
30. Ibid., p. 58.
31. Ibid. I will explain the meaning of this “cause,” which Laruelle calls
“Identity-of-the-last-instance” later.
32. Ibid., p. 54.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 55.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 59.
37. Ibid., p. 60.
38. Ibid., p. 100.
39. Ibid.
40. François Laruelle, Introduction au non-marxisme (Paris: PUF, 2000), p. 62.
41. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005),
pp. 104–106. When discussing the Marxist conception I have written out the
phrase without the dashes, and when talking about the non-philosophical
version I will include the dashes, as found in the original authors.
42. Ibid., p. 117.
43. See Ibid., pp 117–118, for a more technical discussion of these effects that put
it into a quasi-Spinozist form.
44. Ibid., p. 99. Cf. Laruelle, Dictionnare, p. 48.
45. Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, p. 127; Principes de la non-philosophie,
p. 152.
46. Laruelle, Introduction au non-marxisme, p. 40.
240 Notes
47. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London and New

York: Routledge, 2006), p. 149.
48. For Laruelle’s full outline of this history, see his Introduction aux sciences
génériques (Paris: Éditions Pétra, 2008), pp. 39–45.
49. Ibid., p. 44.
50. See ibid., pp. 41–43.
51. Ibid., p. 56.
52. Ibid., p. 57.
53. Ibid., p. 59.
54. Ibid.
55. François Laruelle, “From the First to the Second Non-Philosophy,” in From
Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought , ed. Robin Mackay,
trans. Anthony Paul Smith and Nicola Rubczak (Falmouth: Urbanomic,
2013), p. 308.
56. Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences génériques, p. 14.
57. Laruelle, Théorie des identités, p. 56.
58. Laruelle, “From the First to the Second Non-Philosophy,” p. 308.
59. See Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences génériques, p. 58.
60. Laruelle, “From the First to the Second Non-Philosophy,” pp. 309, 308.
7 Non-Theological Supplement
1. Alain Badiou, interview with Ben Woodward, The Speculative Turn:

Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and
Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), p. 20.
2. Of course Laruelle has made his own remarks about Badiou. See François
Laruelle, Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maosim into Philosophy, trans.
Robin Mackay (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
3. François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul
Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 15; Le Christ futur. Une
leçon d’ héré sie (Paris: Exils Éditeur, 2002), p. 31.
4. François Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), p. 33.
5. Laruelle, Future Christ, p. 27; Le Christ futur, p. 44.
6. See Laruelle, Future Christ, p. 29; Le Christ futur, p. 47.
7. Ibid.
8. Jean-Luc Rannou, La non-philosophie, simplement. Une introduction synthé-
tique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), p. 114.
9. It goes without saying that his democracy is real and transcendent to any
kind or form of representational democracy that remains subsumed in politics
rather than enacting any kind of real democracy. Much the same as the com-
munism Laruelle embraced in a previous chapter is real and transcendent to
any kind of state-form of communism. See ibid., p. 76.
Notes 241
10. François Laruelle, “A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy,” working

paper, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, February 11,
2004. Available online: http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-
non-philosophy-32.html (accessed February 1, 2010).
11. Ibid.
12. Janicaud’s criticism of the theological turn as beginning from a method of
“take it or leave it” suggests an axiomatic character to the theological turn
as well and so suggests that Laruelle is infected by the same philosophical
illness as Henry and Marion. Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology “Wide
Open”: After the French Debate, trans. Charles N. Cabral (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005), pp. 4–7.
13. This is one of the most refreshing aspects of Laruelle’s passage from Philosophy
I to V, the upfront recognition of his own works’ failures and inadequacies as
non-philosophy is continually performed anew in the light of new material.
See again François Laruelle, Principes de la non-philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1995),
pp. 19–42; and Philosophie non-standard. Générique, quantique, philo-fiction
(Paris: Kimé, 2010), pp. 15–44.
14. See Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London:
Routledge, 2002), pp. 51–57. Here Goodchild traces the ways that the
Christian Creeds were codified into a “metaphysical, universal, eternal
spiritual and written” truth that could then be exchanged across cultures
(p. 53).
15. See Laruelle, Future Christ, pp. 140–143; Le Christ futur, pp. 173–176.
16. Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie (Mardaga: Liege-Bruxelles, 1989),
pp. 176–177.
17. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London and New
York: Routledge, 2006), p. 140.
18. See François Laruelle, Une Biographie de l’ homme ordinaire. Des Autorit é s et
des Minorité s (Paris: Aubier, 1985), pp. 7–38. There he remarks that “[m]an
has never been the object of the human Sciences” (p. 8). Rather Man is sub-
sumed into some other aspect of the World in the search for a logic of man
(the anthropo-logical is the amphibology of logic and humanity). It should
also be noted that it is difficult to express in a single word the meaning of indi-
vidual in English as Laruelle differentiates individual from individuel . The
first is a neologism of his own construction playing on the sense of “dual” in
order to express the fundamental duality of individuals, and the second is the
term that is usually translated into English as individual, but he plays with the
“duel,” which means the same in English as it does in French, to signify that
it is a fundamentally antagonistic concept. See ibid., p. 17.
20. Laruelle, Future Christ, pp. 42–43; Le Christ futur, pp. 60–61.
23. Laruelle, Future Christ, pp. 4, 8; Le Christ futur, pp. 22, 26.
24. See Henry Corbin, Le Paradoxe du Monothéisme (Paris: L’Herne, 2003) for a
concise and convincing study of this dual character of monotheistic religions.
242 Notes
25. François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, trans.
Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing,
2012), p. 250; La Lutte et l’Utopie à la fin des temps philosophiques (Paris: Kimé,
2004), p. 204.
26. John Milbank, “Knowledge: The Theological Critique of Philosophy in
Hamann and Jacobi,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, eds. John
Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge,
1999), p. 21.
27. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 5.
30. Zachery Luke Fraser, Draft of “Entry for ‘Generic,’” in The Badiou Dictionary,
ed. Steven Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcom-
ing). Draft available online: http://formandformalism.blogspot.com/2011/03
/generic-entry.html (accessed March 25, 2011).
8 Real Ecosystems (of) Thought
1. On this, see Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God:
Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, forthcoming) and my own essay, which builds upon Barber’s
work to describe Deleuze and Guattari’s ecological philosophy of nature,
“Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: On the Ecology of the
Virtual and the Actual,” SubStance 38.3 (April 2010): 101–112.
2. Christian L évêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere (Plymouth, UK:
Science Publisher, Inc., 2003), p. 29.
3. Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and
p. xiii.
4. François Laruelle, Théorie des identité s (Paris: PUF, 1992), p. 56.
5. François Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard. Générique, Quantique, Philo-fiction
(Paris: Kimé, 2010), p. 54.
6. See Anthony Paul Smith, “Philosophy and Ecosystem: Towards a Transcendental
Ecology,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 65–82.
7. Rocco Gangle, “Translator’s Introduction,” in François Laruelle’s Philosophies
of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle
(London and New York: Continuum, 2010), p. vi.
9. Ibid.
11. Cf. ibid., p. 9. Which isn’t to say that management falls outside of ecology as
such, just that the management itself should be subordinated to knowledge
rather than the demands of quick and popular policies.
Notes 243
12. Slavoj Žižek, “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium

for the Masses.” Available online: http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm
(accessed September 10, 2010).
13. François Laruelle, “L’Impossible foundation d’une écologie de l’océan.” Available
online: http://www.onphi.net/lettre-laruelle-l-impossible-fondation-d-une
-ecologie-de-l-ocean-27.html (accessed March 22, 2011).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. Laruelle often indicates he is talking about a false transcendent version
of a concept by emphasizing the definite article. This works better in French
than in English, as “the nature” is not idiomatic. Often, though, I am forced
to translate it this way to retain Laruelle’s meaning. In this case, however, a
capital “N” serves the same purpose.
16. Ibid. For a historical discussion of the difficulties capitalism has encoun-
tered with the ocean as regards property rights, see Joachim Radkau, Nature
and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 86–93.
17. Laruelle, “L’Impossible foundation d’une écologie de l’océan.”
19. Laruelle, “L’Impossible foundation d’une écologie de l’océan.”
20. François Laruelle, “The Degrowth of Philosophy: Toward a Generic Ecology,”
trans. Robin Mackay in From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard
Thought, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2013) p. 328.
21. Ibid., p. 337–338.
22. Ibid., p. 340.
23. Ibid., p. 345.
24. Ibid., p. 346.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 349.
9 Elements of an Immanental Ecology
1. François Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard. Générique, quantique, philo-fiction

(Paris: Kimé, 2010), pp. 53–54.
2. Timohy Morton, The Ecological Thought, (London and Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 3.
3. See Ibn Khaldû n, 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
244 Notes
University Press, 2008); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The

Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986).
4. Cf. Worster, Nature’s Economy, Part IV.
5. L é vêque 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, tak-
ing 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 L é vêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere [Plymouth, UK:
Science Publisher, Inc., 2003], p. 4).
6. 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 his-
tory of fieldwork in natural history in which botanists or zoologists collected,
described, named, and reported on the distribution and abundance of organ-
isms. Large research teams were not required. The research could be car-
ried 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).
8. F. Stuart Chapin III, Pamela A. Matson, and Harold A. Mooney, Principles of
Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology (London: Springer, 2002), p. 7.
Notes 245
9. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem, p. 1.

10. Ibid., p. 66.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 69.
13. Ibid., pp. 71, 72.
14. Ibid., p. 36.
15. Ibid., pp. 37–39.
16. Ibid., p. 56.
17. Cf. François Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences génériques (Paris: Pétra, 2008),
pp. 24–31.
19. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (London and New York: Penguin
Books, 2001), pp. xii, xx.
20. Ibid., p. 36.
21. Ibid., p. x. Wilson goes on to discuss how even this unit throws up difficulties
in terms of counting. For instance, he writes that “[o]ne third of all recognized
species of organisms are parasites” and “[b]acteria continue to be the ‘black
hole’ of biodiversity, their depths unplumbed” (p. xiii).
22. Ibid., p. 42.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid, pp. 42–45. It should be noted that the majority of hybridization between
species has thus far been found within plant species in the tropics.
25. 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.
27. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 29.
28. Paul S. Giller, Community Structure and the Niche (London and New York:
Chapman and Hall, 1984), pp. 1, 9.
29. Ibid., p. 1.
30. Ibid., p. 7.
31. Cf. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 217.
32. Ibid., pp. 196–198. Cf. Giller, Community Structure and the Niche, p. 10,
where he writes “Each environmental gradient can be thought of as a dimen-
sion in space. If there are n pertinent dimensions the niche can be described
in terms of an n-dimensional space, or hypervolume.”
33. Giller, Community Structure and the Niche, p. 9.
35. Ibid., p. 217. Giller explains that the niche width is formed by the com-
bination of two separate components—the within-phenotype component
(WPC), which describes the level of variation in resource use by individuals,
and the between-phenotype component (BPC), which describes the varia-
tion among individuals of the species population (p. 12). Broad niches mean
that the species tends to use resources in proportion to their availability,
246 Notes
while narrow niches mean that the species tends to concentrate on only some
resources (p. 13).
36. Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature,
trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of
37. Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable for Human
Labor, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2009), p. 27. As is common with translations of Negri and Deleuze and
Guattari, when power is spelled with a lowercase p it is translating the French
puissance or the Italian potenza and when it is spelled with an uppercase P it
translates the French pouvoir or the Italian potere.
38. Ibid., p. 28.
39. Ibid., p. 59.
40. Ibid., p. 75.
41. Ibid., p. 81.
42. Ibid., pp. 96–97.
43. Ibid., p. 52.
44. Cf. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 25.
45. cf. Negri, Labor of Job, pp. 50, 73, for a discussion of this idea as it is found in
the Book of Job.
46. 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 Uexküll, 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).
47. Chapin, Matson, and Mooney, Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology, p. 4.
48. Ibid., p. 140.
49. Ibid., pp. 97, 140.
50. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem, p. 81.
51. Ibid., pp. 67–69.
52. Howard Thomas Odum quoted in ibid., p. 81.
55. Ibid.
58. L évêque, Ecology, pp. 247, 249.
59. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. xi.
61. Ibid., p. 31.
Notes 247
62. Ibid., p. 11.

64. Ibid., p. 174.
65. Ibid. Eotones are an example of spatial heterogeneity.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Cf. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
69. Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” Research in Philosophy
and Technology 12 (1992), 232.
70. Ibid., p. 233.
71. See Ibid., p. 234.
72 . Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and
p. 11.
73. Ibid., p. 9.
74. Ibid., p. 7–9.
75. Ibid., p. 9. The most revealing example of such management is to be found in
the Goulburn-Broken Catchment in Southwest Australia. See pp. 39–52.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
78. Ibid., p. 141.
79. Ibid., p. 11.
80. Ibid., pp. 53–55.
81. Ibid., p. 63.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., p. 75. One must keep in mind of course that the word “cycle” is a useful
metaphor in describing change and not a given or a metaphysical claim.
84. Ibid., p. 76.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., p. 77.
87. Ibid., p. 78.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
10 Ecologies without Nature
1. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 2004), p. 245.
2. Ibid., p. 249.
3. Ibid., p. 248.
4. Ibid., p. 54.
248 Notes
5. Cf. Ibid., p. 224.

6. Ibid., p. 37.
7. Ibid., pp. 10–18.
8. Ibid., p. 231.
9. See Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment,
trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
pp. 36–77.
10. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, and London:
11. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 92–94.
12. See Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, L’Ange: Pour une cyégétique du sem-
blant, Ontologie de la révolution 1 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976), pp. 17–37.
13. Cf. Morton, The Ecological Thought, pp. 2–4.
14. Ibid., p. 2. Morton’s specific engagements with ecology are not of particular
importance here as my own engagement with scientific ecology is comple-
mentary to his notions (like that of “mesh,” which is a slightly more literary
way of saying “ecosystem”), though I think the engagement here is more sus-
tained. Because of this I have elided any in-depth discussion of them, but they
are succinctly summarized in The Ecological Thought.
15. Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 7.
16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. Ibid., pp. 6, 52. Although Morton’s presentation of Deleuze and Guattari’s
“rhizome” seems to have a weak understanding of the diversity of different
rhizomatic plants, such as European grasses and “weeds,” and his suggestion
that they don’t have to deal with gravity is confused, his criticisms regard-
ing the collapse of difference into identity suggest there is a parallel between
Laruelle’s critique of difference and his own.
18. Morton, The Ecological Thought, p. 3.
20. Radkau’s argues for the same idea, showing how the conception of nature
operative in modern environmentalism is parallel to the Christian idea of an
omnipotent God (Radkau, Nature and Power, p. 83).
22. Morton, The Ecological Thought, p. 98. Cf. pp. 98–101.
23. Ibid., p. 3.
24. In the American West the intentional killing of animals considered to be “var-
mints” resulted in a number of ecological issues. These included the usual
maligned species, rodents said to carry disease or destroy human crops, and
also larger mammals such as wolves (who have been all but wiped out in
the American West) and coyotes. See Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A
History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), Chapter 13.
25. Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard, pp. 80–81. The bracketed “the” before
science appears to be Laruelle’s attempt to indicate that the idealist form of
science is here being bracketed.
Notes 249
11 Separating Nature from the World

1. Consider the typical way it is used by Christian theologians in one-sided argu-
ments (since they seem to be the only ones thinking an argument is going on)
with secular philosophers. One of the most direct examples is the writing of
American Methodist Daniel M. Bell Jr.: “Deleuze embraced the univocity
of being in the name of nurturing difference and freedom. Yet as Aquinas
lays out the analogy and the univocity of being in the Summa Theologica, it
becomes clear that the univocity of being cannot preserve difference—at least
it cannot preserve difference peaceably, which means that it cannot preserve
freedom. [ . . . ] The only mediating position for univocal being is conflict,
competition, combat. Univocal being can maintain difference in relation only
by means of a friction (agony) created between different degrees of inten-
sity that necessarily mediates the encounter and clash of otherwise univocal
beings. In contract, the analogy of being maintains difference in a way that
allows difference to be drawn into a relation while preserving (and in the
case of the human, enhancing) the freedom of being. Only the analogy of
being permits differences to draw near in a mode other than competition and
conflict such that in this embrace of intimacy neither being nor its proper-
ties are lost (recall Chalcedon, or the Thomistic principle that grace does not
destroy but perfects nature)” (Daniel M. Bell, Jr., “Only Jesus Saves: Toward a
Theo-political Ontology of Judgment,” in Theology and the Political: The New
Debate, eds. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005), p. 216).
2. See Mark D. Jordan, Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–17.
3. Regarding the relationship of truth and politics Jordan summarizes Aquinas’s
position, “no ruler can prescribe doctrine. The city may regulate the circum-
stances of teaching, never its truth” (ibid., p. 179).
4. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London and
New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 210.
5. For an excellent intellectual biography, see Jean-Pierre Torrell O. P., Saint
Thomas Aquinas, trans. Robert Royal, vol. I: The Person and His Work
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). For an
equally excellent account of Aquinas’s spiritual life, see Jean-Pierre Torrell
O. P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Robert Royal, vol. II: Spiritual Master
(Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003).
6. See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. I, pp. 1–17.
7. Ibid., p. 73.
8. Ibid., pp. 36–53, 75–98.
9. See Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being According to
Thomas Aquinas, trans. E. M. Macierowski (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
University Press, 2004), pp. 9, 12. This former function of the analogy is
what Montagnes calls the predicamental (how we speak of beings) while the
latter is the transcendental analogy or the account of being.
250 Notes
10. Ibid., p. 66.

11. For an interesting and in-depth history of the early reception of Spinoza’s
works, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
Chapter 16.
12. Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne
and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 15.
13. Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, p. 75.
14. Ibid., p. 73. What Goodchild means by cynical is important for our under-
standing of Spinoza’s philosophy of nature. The conception of cynicism that
Goodchild is using here comes from his reading of Diogenes the Cynic. The
essence of cynicism is there shown in the recounting of two stories; the first
is Diogenes responding to Plato’s definition of man as a featherless biped by
bringing in a plucked fowl into the lecture room and the second is Diogenes
drawing of attention away from a set speech by eating lupins followed by
his feigned shock that the assembly would be distracted from the speech by
the simple eating of lupins. “Such cynical gestures consist in responding to
questions concerning the highest ideals with something material, edible and
mortal” (p. 71).
15. Christian L évêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere (Plymouth, UK:
Science Publisher, Inc., 2003), p. 353.
16. Ibid., p. 357.
17. Anne Primavesi, Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. xii.
18. Ibid.
19. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx and Engels Reader, ed. Robert
C. Tucker (New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 1978), p. 145.
20. Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in Basic
Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), p. 276;
and “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1971), p. 213.
21. Heidegger, “Modern Science,” pp. 291, 273.
22. Ibid., p. 303.
23. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), p. 5.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.; emphasis mine.
27. See ibid., p. 25.
28. Ibid.
29. See Brett Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).
30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962), p. 78.
31. Ibid.
Notes 251
32. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

33. Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, p. 54. Cf. Graham Harman, The Quadruple
Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), p. 86.
34. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, p. 184.
35. Ibid., p. 29.
36. Ibid., p. 28.
37. Heidegger, “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” p. 212.
38. Ibid., p. 213.
39. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York and London:
Continuum, 2005), p. 4.
40. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, p. 22. See pp. 1–23 for his prolonged dis-
cussion of the differentiation of philosophy from science and worldview as
well as its essence as rooted in the experience of Dasein.
41. Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980),
p. 15. He repeats these conditions from Being and Event, but where in Being
and Event he has “art” this changes in Manifeste pour la philosophie to simply
“poetry.” See Badiou, Being and Event, p. 4.
42. Badiou, Manifeste, p. 19.
43. See ibid., p. 23, where he discusses the errors of different philosophers in
elevating different truth-procedures to the essence of philosophy, suturing
philosophy to that truth-procedure in a way that leads to errors, including the
error, in Badiou’s eyes, of understanding ontology via poetry.
44. Badiou, Being and Event, p. 4.
45. See ibid., pp. 123–129.
46. Ibid., p. 125.
47. Ibid., pp. 125–126.
48. Ibid., p. 126.
49. Ibid., p. 127.
50. Badiou does not present his system in this way, the question is never on the
particular actuality but always on the truth-event that recreates that thing.
See Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano
(New York and London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 9–33. Here Badiou sketches
out how, in his view, the particular truth that “[t]here are only bodies and
language; except that there are truths” manifests in the four conditions of
philosophy.
51. Ibid., p. 127.
52. Ibid., p. 129.
53. Ibid., pp. 132–134.
54. Ibid., p. 140.
55. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 4.
56. Ibid.
57. Badiou, Being and Event, p. 127.
58. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 9.
59. Ibid., p. 598.
60. Cf. Michael Lewis, Heidegger beyond Deconstruction: On Nature (London
and New York: Continuum, 2007). Lewis shows that, despite the important
252 Notes
differences between the early and later work of Heidegger, the concept of
World and Being are continually at play.
61. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1971), p. 178.
62. Ibid., p. 175.
63. Cf. Lewis, Heidegger beyond Deconstruction, p. 10.
64. Harman, The Quadruple Object, pp. 86–87.
65. Cf. ibid., pp. 96–99.
66. Julian Young, “The Fourfold,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed.
Charles B. Guignon, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 375.
67. Lewis, Heidegger beyond Deconstruction, p. 10.
68. Young, “The Fourfold,” p. 374. Cf. Heidegger, “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,”
pp. 149, 178.
69. Heidegger, “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” p. 148.
70. Ibid., p. 182.
71. Ibid., p. 220.
72. Now, bringing to mind Laruelle’s focus on the ocean discussed in chapter 8,
here the term “earth” refers really to the biosphere, which includes all the
wave-like aspects of energy flowing in ecosystems through the materials that
make them up.
12 Materials for a Theory of Nature
1. Rudi te Velde, Aquinas on God: The “Divine Science” of the Summa theologiae
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 85.
2. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (literal English translation), trans.
Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian
Classics, 1981), Ia, q. 4, a. 2.
3. Velde, Aquinas on God, p. 85.
4. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. A. C. Pegis, James F.
Anderson, Vernon J. Bourke, and Charles J. O’Neil, 4 vols. (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), I/30; hereafter SCG.
5. SCG I/30.3.
6. Ibid.
7. SCG I/30.2.
8. SCG I/30.4. In this passage Aquinas only lists “infinite.” Cf. Velde, Aquinas
on God, p. 80, for a discussion of the other three in the Summa Theologica.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. SCG I/32.4. The argument against univocity is philosophically weak as it is
worked out from a position where the metaphysics of God have already been
decided theologically through the demands of the creeds and the Church
Fathers.
Notes 253
12. SCG I/32.5.

13. SCG I/33.2.
14. SCG I/33.3.
15. SCG I/33.5.
16. See SCG I/34.2–4. Here Aquinas recognizes that analogy could fall into a
similar trap as the other grammars where there is a third term that one must
recognize prior to both God and creation. He himself employs a variation of
this form of analogy in his De principiis naturae, which we explore later.
17. SCG I/34.6.
18. See Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
19. St. Thomas Aquinas, “Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate [selection],” in
Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 45.
23. Velde, Aquinas on God, p. 118.
24. See Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being According
to Thomas Aquinas, translated by E. M. Macierowski (Milwaukee, WI:
Marquette University Press, 2004), p. 24.
25. St. Thomas Aquinas, “On the Principles of Nature,” in Selected Philosophical
Writings, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 67.
26. Aquinas’s Latin natura has more to do with its relation to “birth” or the gen-
eration of things than it does with the cosmos or universe, which would be
indicated under the name mundus. It would appear that, for Aquinas, natura
names the way in which the mundus persists in being. The contemporary
slippage between World and Nature is thus already present in the Medieval
sources.
27. Simply put matter names whatever exists potentially (Aquinas, “On the
Principles of Nature”, p. 67). Form names the actualization of the thing from
its potential as matter (p. 68). Lack of form is an incidental principle, which is
still necessary to generation as matter must lack form to begin with (p. 69).
28. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
29. Ibid., p. 71.
30. Ibid.
31. Aquinas, “Commentary on Botheius’ De Trinitate,” p. 45.
32. See John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, “Truth and Correspondence,” in
Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001).
33. SCG I/65.2
34. Milbank and Pickstock, “Truth and Correspondence,” p. 15.
35. St. Thomas Aquinas, “On Kingship or The Governance of Rulers (De
Regimine Principum, 1265–1267),” in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and
Ethics, ed. and trans. Paul E. Sigmund (London and New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1988), pp. 17–18.
254 Notes
36. François Zourabichvili, Spinoza. Une physique de la pensée (Paris: PUF, 2002),
p. 255.
37. Ibid., p. 220.
38. Rocco Gangle, “Theology of the Chimera: Spinoza, Immanence, Practice,”
in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental
Philosophy of Religion, eds. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler
(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2010), p. 27.
39. Ibid.
40. For example, Steven Nadler’s biography of Spinoza, Spinoza: A Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which presents a radically
atheist Spinoza, as does Stephen B. Smith’s Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom
and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
This view is shared to a lesser extent by Jonathan I. Israel in his Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
41. Nancy K. Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 10–12.
42. Benedict de Spinoza, “Ethics,” in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other
Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), IVPref.
43. Ibid., ID3.
44. Ibid., ID4.
45. Ibid., IIP13. It isn’t entirely clear from the text why we can only have knowl-
edge of these two and no more, though this doesn’t seem really to be at issue
for our understanding of the process of his thought.
46. Ibids., ID5.
47. This is the argument of Deleuze who places Spinoza among other authors
steeped in Neoplatonism and developing various theories of expression and
explication. He writes that the goal of these thinkers “was to thoroughly
transform such Neoplatonism, to open it up to quite new lines of develop-
ment, far removed from that of emanation, even where the two themes were
both present” (Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans.
Martin Joughlin [New York: Zone Books, 1990], p. 19).
48. Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation, p. 3.
49. Blayton Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion: Spinoza, the Bible, and
Modernity, Vol. I: Hermeneutics and Ontology (Lexington: Lexington Books,
2007), p. 6.
50. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 108.
51. Ibid., p. 109.
52. Ibid., p. 107.
53. Spinoza, Ethics, IIP7S.
55. Spinoza, Ethics, IA4.
56. Ibid., IP23.
57. See ibid., IP9.
58. Ibid., IIP7.
Notes 255

60. Ibid.
61. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, translated by Michael Silverthorne and
Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 59.
62. Ibid.
63. IVP18S.
64. Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and
the Difference of Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 60, 68.
65. See Jürgen Mettepennigen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor
of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (London and New York: T&T Clark,
2010); and John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henry de Lubac and the
Debate Concerning the Supernatural (London: SCM Press, 2005).
66. Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New
York: Herder and Herder, 1998) p. 63.
67. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, p. 83.
68. Ibid., p. 81.
69. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 259–260.
70. Ibid., p. 259.
74. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 260–261.
76. Ibid., p. 242.
77. Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London and New
York: Verso, 2008), pp. 7–8.
78. Spinoza, Ethics, VP25Dem.
79. See Alexandre Matheron, Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris:
Aubier-Montaigne, 1971), for an extensive study of this aspect of Spinoza’s
thought.
80. François Laruelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter,”
trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 12 (2001): 37. This is a translation of a section from
François Laruelle, Le Principe de minoritié (Paris: Aubier, 1981).
81. Cf. Laruelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter,” p. 41.
82. Ya’qûb al-Sijistâ nî, Le Dévoilement des choses cachées (Kashf al-Mahjûb), trans.
Henry Corbin (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1988), pp. 33–35.
83. Ibid., p. 81.
84. Christian Jambet, La grande résurrection d’Alamût. Les formes de la liberté dans
le shî’ isme ismaélien (Lagresse: Verdier, 1990), p. 210.
85. A summary of that formalism: There is the radical immanence of the One
as One-in-One, which produces a philosophical resistance identified by
Laruelle as non-thetic transcendence or non(-One) and a form of relative
philosophical immanence as (non-)One. Both are effects of the One-in-One
or Real.
86. See ibid., pp. 33–49, for a compressed history.
256 Notes
87. Christian Jambet, “The Paradoxical One,” trans. Michael Stanish, Umbr(a):
A Journal of the Unconcious (2009): 141; Jambet, La Grande résurrection
d’Alamût, p. 142 [translation slightly modified].
88. Jambet, “The Paradoxical One,” p. 142; La Grande résurrection, p. 143.
89. al-Sijistâ nî, Le Dévoilement des choses caches, p. 77.
90. Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, L’Ange. Pour une cynégétique du sem-
blant, Ontologie de la révolution 1 (Paris: Grasset, 1976), p. 36.
91. Cf. ibid., pp. 213–224.
92. Cf. ibid., p. 92.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., p. 84.
95. Ibid., p. 87.
96. Ibid., p. 100.
97. Ibid., p. 109.
98. Ibid., p. 20.
99. Of course, it may also give birth to the barbaric Angel. See Christian Jambet
and Guy Lardreau, Le Monde. Reponse à la question: Qu’est-ce que les droits
de l’ homme? (Paris: Grasset, 1978), p. 187. Lardreau is more direct about
this in his own work of negative philosophy entitled La véracité, where he
argues for a Kantian sublime within politics defined as “a politics that makes
a finality sensible to us that is completely independent from nature” (Guy
Lardreau, La véractié. Essai d’une philosophie négative [Lagrasse: Verdier,
1993], p. 237). Lardreau again invokes the Angel in his development of the
concept of the political sublime, this time as the “political name for the
desire for death” (p. 241). Within a negative philosophy this desire for death
is limited, it is a desire for the self-referential play of the correlative images
of the self and the other. In the terms laid out in my “The Judgement of
God and the Immeasurable” it is the desire for the death of the play between
friend and enemy. For Lardreau, within a negative philosophy, this desire
is checked by way of a negative presentation of the Real (ibid). Death is
always a form of transcendence as limit for philosophers and Lardreau is no
different (Lardreau, La véractié, p. 243. Cf. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism
and Religion: The Price of Piety (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 148–155). The barbarous Angel, for Lardreau, comes when there is a pos-
itive presentation of the Real, a presentation that threatens to topple the sub-
lime over (Lardreau, La véractié, p. 241). See Anthony Paul Smith, “Nature
Deserves to Be Side by Side with the Angels: Nature and Messianism by way
of Non-Islam,” in Angelaki (Forthcoming, 2014) for a longer discussion of
this angelology.
100. Jambet, Le Grande resurrection, p. 362.
101. Francois Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul
Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 17; Le Christ futur.
Une leçon d’ hérèsie (Paris: Exils Éditeur, 2002), p. 33.
102. Laurelle, Future Christ, pp. 39, 40; Le Christ futur, pp. 58, 59.
Notes 257
105. François Laruelle, “A Science in (en) Christ,” trans. Aaron Riches, in The
Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, eds. Peter M.
Candler, Jr. and Conor Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2010), p. 318.
106. Gilles Grelet, Déclarer la gnose. D’une guerre qui revient à la culture (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2002), pp. 119f50, 119f49.
107. Interestingly al-Sijistâ nî develops an Islamic Christology by way of a kind
of fourfold, since he uses the image of the cross as a hermeneutic for under-
standing Christ. See Abu Ya’qûb al-Sijistâ nî, “The Book of Wellsprings,” in
The Wellsprings of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Paul E. Walker (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1994), pp. 37–111. In the editors’ introduction to
After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, Daniel Whistler and I differentiated
between a postsecular event and the appropriation of that event in the name
of a theologization of philosophy or what we called “imperial secularism.”
The event marked a break with Western imperialism, which used Christian
forms of thought to develop a post-Christian secularism in an attempt to
separate the oppressed colonial subjects internally—a separation of the
political and their religious identity, whereas the appropriation of the event
is often an attempt to reinstate (at best) a war at the ideational level and (at
worst) a new form of imperial war in the name of the clash of traditions.
The postsecular event, we claim there, was located largely with Islamic
countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa and though the
response to the postsecular event is not an Islamic turn in Continental phi-
losophy, there should be more engagement with forms of thought outside of
the Christian tradition. There are two clear non-theological reasons for this:
(1) if the generic is to be located in a way that avoids the shortcomings of
Hegelian philosophy and its continuing influence on the practice of philoso-
phy of religion, where European Christianity comes to be the name for uni-
versalism as the only consummating historical religion, then it must take the
infinite task of working with any material whatsoever in order to locate the
power of the generic that lies there; (2) non-theology always begins from
the perspective of the murdered, and thus from the perspective of heretical
material, which is to say that there is within non-theology a principle of
minority or preferential option for the poor as immanent to generic human-
ity. With regard to the second, in a very real sense, a very bodily sense, a
certain appearance of the power of poverty, what Negri calls the “force of the
slave” in regard to Job, has coalesced around the name “Muslim” (though, of
course, not just the name “Muslim”). In Europe the Muslim has become the
exception that grounds the law, both political law and the economic law of
class difference. As this structural aspect in-person the Muslim is, as Mehdi
Belhaj Kacem has argued, the contemporary form of pariah: “The pariah
is at once captured and delivered, locked within its exclusion and banished
by inclusion” (Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, La psychose françiase. Les banlieues: le
ban de la République [Paris: Gallimard, 2006], p. 18). The reality of the
pariah is manifested clearly in the collusion of the institutional Left with the
establishment Right of Europe regarding these “places of the ban” (Belhaj
Kacem makes a clever play on the name of the suburban ghettoes of France,
258 Notes
les banlieus, as les ban-lieux) as problems to be neutralized (and both speak

in this language if with differing degrees of violence) while also referring to
them as what negatively grounds their existence as government.
Islam as pariah is repeated within thought in the same way as it is
found in the political field. Within a teleological-oriented philosophy of
religion, which always carries with it a certain amount of servitude to the
European project of expansion, Islam poses a problem because it arises
historically after the Christianity, which was to be the consummation of
Spirit in the religious realm. See Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses
of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), p. 164, and the entirety of the chap-
ter “The Revolution of the East,” which is an excellent examination and
exposition of the weaknesses of the engagement of Hegel and Ži ž ek with
Islam, specifically with regard to the One of Islam. Islam is the religion that
proves Christianity’s true universalism, as an idea made concrete, while
(as Toscano says) Islam “takes universalism too far” in its abstract passion
for the real (p. 153). As such, it is both brought within the scope of the
historical development of European spirit and excluded from it as a form of
fanaticism that threatens the rational integration of people within the State.
There is a ban on Islam in Continental philosophy, known for its engage-
ment with Jewish and Christian religious thought, that grounds its prac-
tice within post-Christian secularism insofar as Islam is so dangerous as to
be outside this form of the secular. This is why Islam (though, of course,
not just Islam; we’re not arguing here for a simple “Islamic turn”) must be
material for the construction of a true non-theology, not in the name of an
Islamic theologization of philosophy, but because the event taking place
among Muslims, both as postsecular event and as name of the pariah, have
consequences for philosophy and may help free philosophy, practiced here
as non-theology, from its capture as imperialist weapon.
Conclusion: Theory of Nature
1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. A. C. Pegis, James F.

Anderson, Vernon J. Bourke, and Charles J. O’Neil, 4 vols. (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), II/2.2; hereafter SCG.
2. SCG II/2.3.
3. SCG II/2.4.
4. SCG II/2.5.
5. Eugene F. Rogers, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the
Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1995), p. 5.
6. For a helpful discussion of this separation from what could be termed
a non-theological perspective, see Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 104–107.
Notes 259
7. See Roger D. Sorrel, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation
in Western Christian Attitudes towards the Environment (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), pp. 55–97.
8. Brethren of Purity, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: The Case of the Animals
versus Man before the King of the Jinn, eds. and trans. Lenn E. Goodman and
Richard McGregor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 102.
9. IVP39S and see François Zourabichvili, Le conservatisme paradoxal de Spinoza.
Enfance et royauté (Paris: PUF, 2002), pp. 95–177.
10. François Zourabichvili, Spinoza. Une physique de la pensée (Paris: PUF, 2002),
p. 220; my emphasis.
11. François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to
Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London and New York: Continuum,
2010), p. 202; Les philosophies de la différence (Paris: PUF, 1986), p. 219.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 13.
13. Christian Jambet, “A Philosophical Commentary,” trans. Hafiz Karmali, in
Paradise of Submission: A Medieval Treatise on Ismaili Thought, ed. and trans.
S. J. Badakhchani (London and New York: I.B Tauris, 2005), p. 181.
14. Naīr al-Dīn ūsī, Paradise of Submission: A Medieval Treatise on Ismaili
Thought, ed. and trans. S. J. Badakhchani (London and New York: I.B Tauris,
2005), p. 16.
15. Jambet, “A Philosophical Commentary,” 181.
16. Cf. ibid., p. 178.
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Index
actuality 21, 35, 43, 77, 106, 126, being

133, 136, 146, 178, 186, 196, -generic 92
202, 206–8 -in-the-world 120, 178
aesthetics, environmental 27 Benedict XVI, Pope 6, 8, 49, 53, 121,
alterity 2, 5–6, 10, 72, 76–8, 99, 113, 174, 187
133, 164, 168, 170, 184–5, 211, biodiversity 31, 42–3, 60, 113, 116,
216, 219, 222 131–2, 134–9, 145, 150, 219
Althusser, Louis 88 biological diversity 131, 134
analogia entis 171–3 see also analogy biology 26, 29, 36–7, 82, 125–6, 131
of being biosphere 1, 10, 20, 24–5, 32, 38, 48–9,
analogy 153, 168, 191–8, 201, 219–20 52, 54, 104, 115, 128, 134–7, 139,
analogy of being 171–2, 203 143, 146–7, 151–2, 175, 185–7,
angels 210, 213, 215–16 219–20
antiphilosophy 66, 96 bodies 5, 51, 54, 92, 108, 143, 145, 149,
apophaticism 190, 192–3, 197, 219 182–3, 201, 205–6, 214, 221, 223
significant 193, 197 Boff, Lenoardo 53–4, 56
Aquinas, St. Thomas 15–16, 47, 49, Botkin, Daniel B. 20–5, 138
113, 115, 171–5, 190–8, 202–4, Brassier, Ray 33, 36, 39, 42, 63–5, 67,
208–9, 218–19 71, 77, 148
attributes 200–2, 207, 212 Brethren of Purity 220
authority 16, 48, 75, 79, 87, 97–8,
102–7, 110, 160–1, 171, 174, 177, capitalism 3, 50, 79, 160, 213
189, 205–6, 215 carbon 146–7
autonomy, radical 70, 79, 118, 147–8, causality 79–81, 89, 113, 194
211 charity 16, 142, 205, 207–8, 223
axioms 5–6, 14, 30, 43–4, 61, 69, chimera 88, 199, 221–2
71, 75–6, 80–1, 85, 87, 91, 97, Christ 47, 80, 97–9, 101–4, 108–9,
99–100, 102–3, 109, 174, 182 172, 214–16, 220
Christianity 48–9, 93, 98, 101, 103,
Badiou, Alain 4, 25, 62–3, 66, 82–4, 108, 110, 215–16
91, 96–7, 109, 118, 168, 177, climate 3, 150, 185–6
179–83, 210 communism 60
Barber, Daniel Colucciello 242f1 conatus 173, 205–7
Barth, Karl 6, 47, 105 correlationism 67–8
272 Index
cosmos 23, 47, 51–2 ecological crisis 3, 27, 37, 45, 47–8,
creation 1, 16, 21, 45–9, 52, 79, 87, 50, 53–6, 163, 170
90, 132, 135, 139–40, 142–5, ecological degradation 48, 51
163–4, 170, 175, 190–4, 197–9, ecological imperialism 151
203, 210, 218–20 ecological restoration, practice of 21, 151
act of 218–19 ecologism 30, 52, 116
Creator 21, 51, 190, 209–10 ecology
creatural 9, 164, 167, 217–21, 223 deep 29–30, 39
creatures 1, 9–10, 16, 142, 144, 157, ecosystem 127–8
163, 167, 172–3, 190–3, 198, history of 22, 53
209, 216, 218–20, 223, 225 human 49, 121
culture 8, 14, 22, 49, 51, 106, 136, ecosophy 29, 31–2
185–7, 209 ecosystem 7–9, 13, 19–21, 24–5, 31,
Cunningham, Conor 203 36, 43–4, 53–5, 60, 113–17,
125–32, 134–9, 144–51, 153–5,
Dasein 177–80, 183 162–4, 169–70, 175–6, 182–4,
death 2, 14–15, 23, 101, 139–45, 147, 187, 196
162, 185–6, 209, 214, 224 analogical 198
decision 64–5, 67, 96, 100, 123, 152 concept 19–20, 55, 127–30, 182
declension type 6, 18, 46–7, 49–50, 53 individual 25, 135
Deleuze, and Félix Guattari 62, 83–4, philosophical 114–15
114, 224 single transcendent 60
Deleuze, Gilles 3–4, 39, 63, 66, 78, structure 149, 151
82–4, 96, 114, 136, 201, 205–6, energy
219 definition of 146, 148
democracy flows 42, 114, 129–30, 145–7, 150,
real 2, 99 223
(of) thought 2, 13, 59–60, 80, 99, energy exchange 19, 31, 114–15, 127,
115, 159 137, 145, 147, 170, 176, 182
Derrida, Jacques 66, 157, 162 environment 20–1, 30–2, 37, 47, 116,
determination 77–8, 88, 114, 159, 178 121, 123, 126, 129, 137, 147, 150,
-in-the-last-instance 80–1, 86–7, 89 159–61, 183
theological 101, 122, 200 environmental thought 37, 39–40, 45,
theological over- 129, 132 47, 152, 168, 176
dualism 56, 78, 89, 98, 113, 136, 152, epochē 34–5
214 equilibrium 21, 153–5
duality 23, 89, 92, 97, 107, 129, 134, equivocation 199–200, 207–8, 222
186, 212 essence 32, 42, 66, 75–6, 79, 84–5,
dyad of God and nature 208–9, 211 104, 108, 162, 180, 194, 200–3,
207, 210
earth 1, 10, 22–5, 36, 47–51, 104, essence of philosophy 65, 86
119–21, 128, 132, 135, 143–4, ethics 15, 27–9, 39, 45, 47, 56, 79–80,
147, 175, 183, 185–7, 208, 210, 83, 110, 136, 140, 199–202, 220,
213, 216, 222–4 225
Index 273
Christian 47 identity 7, 13–16, 26, 41, 43, 51, 62,

environmental 27–9, 33, 38–9, 90 87–9, 98, 106–7, 109, 130–1,
event 3, 67, 84, 101, 108, 180, 204 133–4, 136, 146–7, 154–5, 185–7,
experience 4, 39, 64–5, 73, 76, 80–1, 192, 201–3, 209–10
83, 85, 91, 97, 116, 141, 143, 163, identity of philosophy 62, 179–80
171–2, 186, 212, 222–3, 225 immanence 4–5, 9, 64–6, 77–8,
84, 86, 91, 104, 107, 109, 114,
fabulation 163, 206, 219–20, 223, 225 116–17, 121, 125, 127, 129,
fiction 118, 126, 209, 218–19, 222 135–6, 139–40, 207–8, 212
foundation 72, 120–1, 157, 211–12, absolute 4, 104, 209–10
216, 222 plane of 83
fourfold 8, 168, 183–7, 209, 216, 223 radical 4–6, 9–10, 14, 65, 76–8,
81, 86–7, 97–9, 103, 108, 115,
Gaia hypothesis 24, 38, 52, 175–6 130, 136, 154, 163, 167, 211–13,
generic 56, 81, 87, 91–3, 108–10, 123, 219, 221–5
133, 135, 187 in-One 133, 146, 184, 187, 189, 208,
ecology 110, 122, 136 219
ecosystem 184 One- 78, 86
secular 62, 105–7 vision- 45, 65, 70, 76–8, 80, 86–7,
truth 81 100, 149
generic matrix 56, 90, 93–4, 107–8, inflection type 6, 18, 49–51, 53–4
116, 145 Islam, Ismaili 174, 187, 211–12, 216,
God 1, 8–9, 15–16, 37–8, 46, 50–1, 53, 221–2, 224–5
61, 102, 105, 132, 140–4, 162–4,
172–4, 176, 186–7, 189–94, Jambet, Christian 160, 211, 213–16,
196–205, 207–11, 216–22 224
knowledge of 192–4, 202–3 Job 140–4, 214
Golley, Frank B. 128, 130 justice 16, 76, 141, 205, 207
Goodchild, Philip 3, 173–4, 198,
207 Lardreau, Guy 213–16
grace 142–3, 145, 203–4, 208 Laruelle, François 2–4, 6–8, 14, 42, 56,
Grant, Iain Hamilton 39–42, 83 59–70, 73–93, 95–105, 107–10,
113, 115–23, 125, 131, 146, 159,
Hadot, Pierre 14, 140 163–4, 167, 174, 215, 221–2
Harman, Graham 184 Latour, Bruno 6–7, 117, 119, 157–61,
Heidegger, Martin 5, 8, 29, 37–8, 54, 222
63, 66, 83, 85, 96, 168, 176–80, Lévêque, Christian 43, 122, 127, 147,
183–6, 202, 210 150
heresy 75, 80, 95, 97–8, 101–2, 104, life
106, 108, 215 dialectic of 139–40, 142, 145
hierarchy 4, 21, 74, 79, 81–2, 87, 132, diversity of 135 see also
138, 161 biodiversity
Husserl, Edmund 5, 27, 32–9, 60–1, Llewelyn, John 37–8
66, 72 Lubac, Henri de 204
274 Index
Man, radical immanence of 98–9, negation 69, 72, 78, 101–2, 162, 191,
101, 215 193, 198, 212, 225
material Negri, Antonio 140–4, 214
ecological 38, 62, 164 niche 46, 113, 136–41, 144–5, 153,
quasi-ecological 38 170, 173, 176, 178, 182–4, 219
religious 62, 97–9, 108 non-philosophy
theological 55, 62, 100, 167 method of 7
materialism 2, 5–7, 9, 110, 143, 167, practice of 7, 62, 69, 73–4, 78, 81, 96
208, 223 waves of 90, 93
speculative 67–8 non-religion 102, 105–6
matheme 177, 180–2 non-theology 7, 62, 72, 99–100,
matter 102–3, 107–8, 174
exchange of 145, 149–50, 196, 198 non-thetic transcendence 167–8, 208,
ultimate 195–6 212, 221, 223–4
McFague, Sallie 50–2, 54 normativity 9, 135–6
Meillassoux, Quentin 39, 64–5, Northcott, Michael 47–8, 50, 52–4
67–72, 95 nouvelle théologie 204
Messiah 108, 143, 215, 220–1, 223
messianic act 211, 214 object
messianism 91, 93, 209, 211–12, 216 of knowledge 85, 122, 213
metaphilosophy 59, 62, 73, 83, 118 real 71
metaphysics 5, 7, 28, 36, 39, 45, 56, Odum, Eugene and Thomas 128–9, 146
68, 70, 73–4, 83, 177, 180, 205, ontology 5, 29, 76, 82–3, 85, 93, 139,
218 163, 178–81, 190, 199–200, 225
Milbank, John 106, 219 organicism 19, 83, 128
Morton, Timothy 7, 117, 126, 157,
160–3, 222 parallelism 200–2
Mullarkey, John 59 phenomenology 4, 18, 32–4, 38
philo-fiction 7, 56, 70, 73, 77, 91,
Naess, Arne 29–32, 125 110, 118, 126
naturalism 2, 4, 6–10, 90, 125, 139–40, philosophical decision 7, 59, 61–71,
144, 167, 187, 189, 198, 202, 209, 75–6, 79–80, 86–8, 92, 100,
223–4 107, 113
nature theory of 63, 68
creatural 222–3 philosophy
ecological 20, 39 Christian 84, 105
ecology without 161–2 environmental 18, 20, 26–9, 38–9,
perversity of 8–9, 13–15, 25, 41, 45–6, 55, 59, 66, 151
44, 55–6, 61, 144, 167, 197 first 27, 85, 91
philosophy of 18, 26, 28, 39, 41, philosophy and ecology, unified
55, 62, 67, 113, 168, 180, 183 theory of 115
real identity of 183, 210 physis 41, 178–9, 183, 210
theological conceptions of 8, 46, piety 3, 9, 99, 108, 170–4, 189, 192, 207
135, 164 Plato’s cave 34, 159–60
Index 275
political ecology 117, 119–20, 122–3, dominant 113, 138, 175, 182–3
131, 158–61 hybrid 133
Popper, Karl 43–4 Speculative Realism 6, 67
protest 10, 139–41, 214, 221 Spinoza, Benedict de 3, 8, 15–17, 29,
pure nature 202–4, 207–9, 219 66, 87, 164, 168, 173–5, 187,
198–208, 215, 221, 223
radical immanence of nature 9, 217, substance 40, 136, 194, 200–3
219, 223–4 immaterial 194
Radkau, Joachim 152 suffering 2–3, 142–4, 162, 220
Real 4–5, 14–15, 25, 28, 30, 55–6, sufficient philosophy, principle of 64,
64–81, 84, 86–7, 91, 93, 95–104, 70, 74–5, 100
107–8, 110, 116–18, 129, 136, sufficient theology, principle of 66,
174, 218–20, 222–5 90, 100–2, 189
-One 77–8, 81, 86, 89, 93, 95, 97, supernatural 203–5, 221
99, 104, 106, 115–16, 134, 163, suspension, realist 70–2
210–12, 219 system of energy exchange 19, 147
realism 204
rebellion 104–6, 213, 216 Tansley, Arthur 19–20, 128–30
regional knowledges 5, 13–14, 51, 55, Taylor, Paul W. 28–9, 31–2
59, 81, 89, 93 theology
resilience 60, 115, 117, 135, 151–2, 163 eco- 45, 54–5
thinking 152, 154–5 environmental 18, 24, 46–7, 63,
resurrection 101, 209–11 66, 95, 175
revolution 108, 213–14 Islam 172
Ruether, Rosemary Radford 52, 54 liberation 6, 54
natural 47, 218
Salt, Brian 115, 152–4 negative 72, 102, 162, 191,
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 213
Joseph 5, 40–2 thought
science divisions of 163
autonomy of 84, 86 ecological perspective 148
division of 86, 164 generic form of 56, 93
modern 177, 179 image of 20, 23, 149, 164
philosophy of 33, 44, 82–3, 100, 131 immanental 90
posture of 65, 86 non-philosophical 88, 101
scientism 56, 73, 87, 89–90, 117, 131, 161 non-theological 99
secularism 105–8 Toscano, Alberto 258f107
sékommça 209, 214, 216, 219, 224–5 tradition 54, 102–5, 174
Sijistânî, Abu Ya’qub al- 8, 164, 168, transcendence 5, 47, 65–6, 78, 86,
175, 209–213, 224 99, 107, 114, 117, 144, 168, 170,
social-ecological systems 152–3 172, 186, 197–8, 201, 208, 219,
species 9, 13, 22, 43, 123, 126–7, 130, 221–2
132–5, 137–9, 145–6, 150, 153, absolute 143, 221
163–4, 169, 182, 192 relative 5
276 Index
transcendent 5, 9, 21, 65–6, 78, 86, unveiling 184, 186, 190, 198
105, 114, 116, 122, 136, 145, 157,
173, 187, 191, 208 Velde, Rudi te 190
transcendental 35, 40, 61, 65, 75, 77, violence 10, 47, 61, 107, 139–40,
84, 86–7, 109, 114, 116, 212 144–5, 197, 221, 223
transcendental epochē 35
truth-procedures 180–2 Whistler, Daniel 233f53
ūsī, Na īr al-Dīn al- 8, 164, 187, Wilson, Edward O. 42–5, 132–4
224 world
metaphysical concept of 168, 178
unified theory 7, 9, 54, 73, 75, 79, natural 28, 50, 152, 171, 173
90–1, 99, 107, 110, 116–17, 125,
161, 216–17 Žižek, Slavoj 5, 40–3, 119, 138
univocal predication 192–3 Zourabichvili, François 199, 221

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A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

Radical Theologies is a call for transformational theologies that break

Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism

ANTHONY PAUL SMITH

Series Preface vii

Part I The Perversity of Nature Foreclosed to Thought

Part II The Non-Philosophical Matrix

Part III Immanental Ecology and

Part IV A Theory of Nature

Conclusion: Theory of Nature 217

Radical Theologies encompasses the intersections of constructive theology,

When I first began looking at scientific ecology the horror present in

persistent questions. Reading Laruelle opened up thinking for me and

its influence, but it remains somewhat concealed. That model is Philip

has certain structural resemblances with naturalism and materialism)

subjective character of creatures, for as creatures constantly proliferate and

The Perversity of Nature

Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse

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

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

the overdetermination of scientific ecology by prior philosophical or theo-

Ecology and Thought

Tansley’s conception of the ecosystem escaped overdetermination of

Nature as Divine Order

Nature as Fellow Creature or Superorganism

Nature as Great Machine

[T]he belief in aesthetically pleasing and theologically satisfying physi-

to human mastery to be made perfect.20 The mechanical image fails not

The Evolving Images: Cybernetic and Biosphere

Images of Nature and Images of Ecosystems

Philosophy and Ecology

Many are looking to foster a relationship between ecology and philoso-

Ethics and Ecology

Normally, owing in part to the “economics of thought,” academic philo-

model that will be taken up by a plethora of environmental philosophers:

study of the inter-relationships among organisms and between organisms,

on problems inherent to it and related to environmental issues, he also

Phenomenology and Ecology

In the contemporary world of philosophy many hold the opinion that

There is a two-step approach to the radical or transcendental epochē. First

The self-reflection of the phenomenological reduction is not a radicality that

Where we stand, then, in this transcendental epochē is above the world,

In a certain way the epochē is but a deepening of the scientific approach to

transcendental subjectivity, as ethically reworked by Emmanuel Levinas,

Philosophies of Nature and

philosopher and pushing it to its limits. For Grant that philosopher is

of the three types of knowledge which conceives itself not as a neutral

[Philosophy] is “the infinite science,” and cannot therefore be “conditioned”

in-the-last-instance, these are both nature as One). Grant’s point, following

science in the same way as nuclear physics or molecular biology.”57 Some of

requires axioms and heuristic concepts, but philosophers of nature should

Theology and Ecology

insofar as theology claims to subsume itself into the same vision-in-God

Declension and Ecology

The declension type is not exclusive to theology. It is, in terms we will

of the createdness of creation. This witnesses to theology’s thinking meta-

This constellation of practices was not only inimical to religion, though,

The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that

Inflection and Ecology

On the whole the inflection model engages with a science understood