Today a finite world arises facing an infinite hominiscent. A few words here to close my argument for the moment.
Let us step back. The first act of the major evolution in our relation to the world and human destiny is played out in Antiquity, where various wisdoms, even when they disagreed, all distinguished things that depended on us from those that did not depend on us. Wise men knew—or knew they should know—how to align their behavior and will with the first, without worrying about the others that they considered to be necessary. From Epicureans to my father, as well as La Fontaine, none of the Stoics would have had the arrogance to hope one day to control climate, epidemics, or the moment of birth or death.
The second act introduces the modern age. Let us become, says Descartes, like “the masters and possessors of nature.” This program maps the path of what three centuries have rightly called progress. As a result of the research and labor promoted by the initial project, more and more things came to depend on us. I have just listed some of the performances that rightly passed for great achievements in the eyes of those contemporaries who benefited from them. This was before anxiety peddlers and the children of comfort blanketed the spoilt West with waves of melancholy.
The third act strikes at the contemporary hour on the dot: we finally depend on the things that depend on us. This is a strange, difficult to manage loop. Indeed, we depend on a world for whose production we are partly responsible. As I have said, we are entering the anthropocenic era.
Like lightning, the financial crisis I started with strikes back at us. Indeed, facing reality as it is, facing the things of the world, we confront the same situation as in the economy where we depend on what actually depends on us, money, the market, work, and commerce. This is why at the beginning I traced a parallel between the two gaps, the one I analyze and the financial one. In other words, the concrete world behaves as if we had made it; similarly, the money we mint and the projects we undertake act towards us as if we had not produced them.
Well formulated and clearly outlined, this blinding reversal points to unfathomable situations that will require deep thought. The signs we make and the world we did not make, our products and the concrete given, our reason and reality, free will and necessity, all mixed up in a strange new way, confront us and demand a different, unprecedented vision of the world and humans, of theory and practice. Now that we have finally acquired almost total control and ownership of nature, we end up being owned and controlled more or less by nature. We were going to manipulate nature but in turn it manipulates us, just like the market. It is as if a new subject is now rising up to face us. Let us examine this.
To make this loop clearer, let us look at one of Goya’s paintings which I analyzed twenty years ago on the first page of the Natural Contract. To avoid dealing with really difficult questions, our society takes refuge in performances and spectacles: on the one hand, terror and pity, with plenty of dead and corpses to give weight to reality and seriousness to empty repetitions; on the other hand, we have bread and games, to pique our interest. We are drugged by the question: who will win? Ceaselessly asked, the question starts and promotes breathless moments of ever-recurring suspense. Who will be the winner in the elections, in the best auction, in soccer? Who will win medals at the Olympic Games? Strange expectations for an outcome everybody knows ahead of time: the richest always win, in the Olympic games as well in elections.
Goya’s painting represents two bare-breasted adversaries in combat. “Who will win”?, anxiously ask the above-mentioned drug addicts. When Hegel pits the Master and the Slave against each other, and rather quickly gives the result—the Slave becomes the Master’s master—as an unworldly philosopher he forgets to tell us where the conflict is taking place: in an execution spot, a forest clearing, or a sumo ring? Obliged by his pictorial mode of representation to be more realistic, Goya paints the spot: he thrusts his pugilists in quicksand. With each blow, the fighters sink progressively deeper, and their mouths, full of sand, muzzled by anxiety, try to scream for help… neither one of course will be saved and escape the hard, dense, and compact quicksand.
The game with two players that fascinates the masses and opposes only humans, the Master against the Slave, the left versus the right, Republicans against Democrats, this ideology against that one, the greens versus the blues…, this game begins to disappear when a third party intervenes. And what a third party! The world itself. Here quicksand, tomorrow the climate. This is what I call “Biogea,” an archaic and new country, inert and alive, water, air, fire, the earth, the flora and fauna and all the living species.
The game with two players is over and we start a game with three. This is the contemporary global situation.
Taking into consideration this new third party forces us to make a strange exit from the strictly political, that is, the links between humans alone, and from citizenship understood as the totality of relations between us in cities. We become conscious of the fact that from immemorial times we only played games for two and only took humans into account. We believe that these perpetual duels involving a hundred negotiations between governments and unions, and between governments in international assemblies, all defending their own interests, solve or will solve problems external to their debates. These problems concern unhealthy air, water and the seas’ prodigious life, fire, and energy, the devastating disappearance of living species, and so on. We trust the old politics which is essentially defined by the game with two players confronting each other, humans against humans. It used to be called dialectics, which was even supposed to be the motor of history!
Absent from the negotiations, or rather serving as their pretext, the air continues to be polluted while life drains out of the sea and species die off. Who will defend the silent fish that nourish a fourth of the poor? Air and water have no tongue or speech, so who will speak in their names? Who will represent the earth and fire, the bees and the plants they pollinate? This is a definitive blow to human narcissism: we are forced to let the world enter our political relations as a third party. Will the new game with three players replace the preceding triad, where each function presupposed games with just two players?
International institutions in vain perpetuated those two-player games which remain blind or harmful to the world. Who will have the audacity to found a global institution where Biogea will finally be represented and have the right to speak? In a recent book, I called it WAFEL, the English initials representing the four elements and life…. Unlike the usual institutions where the nations’ delegates gather, it would bring together direct representatives of water, air, fire, earth, and life—in short, of Biogea, whose name means Life and Earth.
We have always lived and will be living in that new and ancient human home. Yes, we live there in the presence of Flora and Fauna, rocks, seas, and mountains, without borders or customs posts. Similarly, Latin families used to group mothers and fathers, cousins and brothers, agrarian tools, plows and yokes with farm animals, cows, pigs, and broods. Humans were not dissociated from their world. Biogea will not do this either. We have lived there forever, before history, wars and hatreds, cultures and languages separated us. Today we return there after a period of forgetfulness. Like prodigal sons we go home. Asserting itself against our oblivion and ingratitude, Biogea in turn makes us forget our thousand networks of separation.
It is a strange country, familiar, as old as it is real, a new and old nation haunted by things, where the living are born, including humans. Ephemeral human nations carved temporary borders and made us into strangers to one another, even though water and air know nothing of these barriers. It has its own laws like those that organize various human regions as decreed by legislators as famous as Solon or Rousseau. In Biogea, they are called Newton, Poincaré, Darwin, and Pasteur.
Well known to scholars, but often foreign today to many contemporary men and their practices, this country has no rights or politics yet and has never appointed ministers or ambassadors. Le Contrat naturel, Le Mal propre and La Guerre mondiale1 tried to lay the foundations of an emerging jurisdiction. In short, those books first proposed a preliminary peace to end the warlike violence exploiting the things of the world; then the establishment of a common good opposing conduct responsible for the pollution that dirties the world. No one has ever founded a society or even a family without first drafting laws. Of course, there is no law without language.
Biogea, where humans and the world live in symbiosis, not only speaks the universal language of the laws mentioned above, mathematics, but it uses different kinds of codes, since everything, us included, is both coding and coded. All of us, inert, living and human things, send, receive, stock, and manage information. These four rules are the universals of human languages as well as codes for living beings and things. These four operations or actions reign in Biogea. Like the laws, these codes have the same name as the Civil Code or Napoleon’s code. We return to the law.
With an entirely new short-circuit between natural and cultural codes, Biogea suggests another idea of so-called globalization. To be sure, globalization emerged from our mobility, and the transportation far and wide of humans and merchandise. Understood only in this sense, it proves our useless narcissism and short-term narrow-mindedness. We have globalized ever since our emergence by leaving Africa, traveling through Eurasia, sailing towards Australia or traveling alongside the Rockies and the Andes. Very quickly we chose routes to transport fruit and vegetables, silk and spice, and we followed those travelled by the Incas. We also transported our favorite animals in our tents and the hulls of our boats, as well as clandestine passengers like rats, fleas, microbes, and fatal viruses. Such expansions that have occurred for millennia will only grow with our contemporary technologies. This globalization dates from the emergence of Homo sapiens, but today we are no longer dealing with the same type of expansion.
The new type requires that we think, act, and live facing the world. The hominescent described in the first part is globalizing as he forges the globe and builds up his power to face that of the world. Living in the anthopocene era as a symbiot and inhabitant of Biogea, he negotiates with it and will invent yet to be written or spoken laws, whose spirit and significance will constitute a synthesis between Solon and Newton, Einstein and Montesquieu, between the laws of nature and those of the city, between the codes governing life and those governing conduct. I believe that philosophy has forever searched for the site allowing us to understand why those two words, law and code, are valid for humans and things. Here it is.
Can Biogea itself take the floor thanks to its own codes? How will it enter into negotiations with us? Can it become a legal subject?
At the start of the classical age a legal debate, Galileo’s trial, signaled the first tensions between scholars and society: it was still the same game with two players. Let me briefly look back at this history. In his work, Galileo formulated an algebraic language to talk about an event in the world. The Church tradition had a very different language: religious, mythical, theological, whatever. Even though there was a condemnation, it did not lead to a man’s death. Fascinated by the spectacle of a contradictory and pathetic debate, history and ideology remember the fight but forget its object: the fall of a thing. Nobody in those days judged Galileo for having observed or understood this. At stake was whether the divine or algebraic language could provide explanations. Again, a game with two players.
On the contrary, among the Greeks in Antiquity, whose wisdom we habitually celebrate, numerous trials announced and preceded Galileo’s. Many of those who were already called physicists before Socrates were condemned on the explicit charge of dealing with affairs of the world and hence abandoning those of the city. Sometimes the death penalty was imposed. It was not a question of confronting two different discourses but of condemning the very act of observation. Your head is always up in the air, towards the stars; falling in the well, you become ridiculous, even in the eyes of women. You are not doing your duty as a citizen and you neglect the civic morality of engagement! Death to the uncommitted!
Although they were the founders of science, the Greeks made the world into the mute site of forgetfulness and treason, the suburb of banishment. So it remains. Indeed, most of those international colloquia I attend ask me to speak about the relations between the sciences and society; in other words, about current relations between certain humans and others who engage in a thousand different types of discourse; in other words, to deal with the affairs of the city. Yes, commitment, but not to the world, which remains the third excluded party.
We regress from the lenient age of Galileo when two discourses at least spoke about things, to an Antiquity that was cruel to humans and expelled the world from the game.
The hard sciences at least deal with the world’s affairs while society deals with society. To please worthy people, I could indulge in a few well-known and widely repeated variations on the spectacle game of science and society. I could talk again about the tense relations between scholars and the military; about the conflicts between biologists or doctors and jurists or religious people; denounce creationism; deplore the absence of scientific chronicles in the media; mention again the need for ethics committees; cry about Chernobyl; repeat the rumors circulating among the public about electrical waves; quote those mowing down GMOs (Genetically Modified Organism); condemn Monsanto and their criminal strategies for laying their hands on species and their reproduction; evoke the misery of surrogate mothers—in other words, talk about current affairs!
For half a century and often in solitude, I have worked since the 1960s on these problems concerning morality, the law, and politics. I have sometimes even discussed them under sharp academic criticism. I could therefore repeat at leisure and for the pleasant sake of repetition the arguments and coups of these debates, whose glare and noise are now in the forefront since the spectacle demands as many games with two players as possible.
The sciences speak of the things of the world and societies about societies; administrators and politicians deal with cities, not with the things of the world. For many people, the famous title of a Parisian newspaper2 signifies the worldly world of humans rather than the global world of things of the world. And as countries tend to become generalized cities, who in society will now look at the things of the world? In countries similar to ours, the proportion of farmers has declined from 50 to 2 percent in recent decades; who now works in the abandoned fields? Who lives in the countryside except the rich from the cities who have secondary residences in which to enjoy Arcadia? Philosophers and intellectuals, politicians and journalists, in short those who count, since they have at their disposal sites from which to send images and words, from early age were only fed on the humanities and social sciences; who then will meet with the sciences that talk about the things of the world? When some time ago I published Le contrat naturel, I provoked the indignation or laughter of those good people because I asked them to become a little like physicists. We live and think as if the world did not exist.
However, here is the news. While the sciences, since the Greeks and Galileo, dealt with the things of the world in more and more sophisticated and specialized disciplines, recently they have spoken together, more concretely and united with a common voice. More attentive to detail and relations, they now talk about the world as a global partner and no longer in terms of local things. They also say that the world is speaking. It is as if scholars are beginning to decipher what Biogea is telling us.
As they continue to integrate, the sciences discover and invent the world, whose background murmur is sending society an urgent message. How should we hear this new partner, the archaic ship on which we have embarked, the home of our ancestors and our descendants? For the first time we saw strange and powerful news for humanity in the image of the globe shown us by cosmonauts. I have just told of the strength and power of the world’s transformations, and now we learn of its threats. Do we hear its voices or its Voice?
I will venture the hypothesis that our Western culture and history slowly began to take the world less and less into account. We spent all our lives and thoughts leaving Biogea. Even our sciences keep it at a distance by objectifying it. All cultures take the world into account, except ours. For instance, ours substituted for the ancient natural law a modern natural law founded exclusively on a supposed human nature. The Great Pan is dead, a mysterious voice whispered around the Mediterranean at the beginning of our era. The real is rational; deaf to reality, we only listen to rationality. Humans amongst ourselves, we hunker in the city intra muros, away from the countryside, away from rusticity, out of the hard sciences, out of the world. Only collective or individual subjects are important, narcissistic daffodils together in their field.
However, our world-less culture suddenly finds the world again as a totality, unlike the partial or localized view from all the other cultures or our sciences of the past. Our voice smothered the world’s. We must hear its voice. Let us open our ears.
Ice melting, waters rising, hurricanes, infectious pandemic diseases: Biogea is starting to scream. The global world, although stable beneath our feet, is suddenly falling on the heads of women and men. They had expected it so little that they are wondering how in their world-less society to deal with the sciences that were turned to the things of the world, and have added up and measured its sovereign forces and heard strange voices. Panic time, the Great Pan is back!
And as the world is suddenly falling on our heads, we realize, hopefully not too late, that this game with two players, often taking the form of our suffering or our wars and always of colloquia and delightful scenarios, is replaced by a new game with three players. The rules have changed and urgent problems need to be faced.
The new triangle is called: the Sciences—Society—Biogea. It really is a new game for three players: two kinds of humans often battling each other, plus the world that moreover includes us. We have three relationships, not one; we have a triangular surface and no straight line. There are no men or women in this rediscovered Biogea because we had excluded it. However, at the other summit of the triangle, it acts and reacts upon us like a kind of prime mover. The summit of the new triangle acts and reacts on the others and hence on us.
Can we express what the voice from that summit is saying?
Today the sciences, overcoming their differences, are saying what the World is saying while society is still interested only in itself. Today, as society produces the things of the world and in return receives global effects on its head, who will speak in the name of the silent partner whose worrisome rumbling is, little by little, covering the deafening noise of city centers and the booming sounds of the politico-media circus?
For example, our international institutions are well-named: they are indeed nations, and so exhibit the often polemical relations between exclusively human societies. It is always a game with two players—for instance, the men on opposite sides of the fishing problem mentioned above, where each side tries to increase yields and profits. As no one represents the mute fish, their species agonize in empty oceans even though most of the poor live off fish. In these institutions, civil servants defend the interests of their respective governments, never those of the world. Every game with two players excludes a third party. Yes, the world remains the excluded third party of our outdated policies. Aren’t you laughing your head off when the world’s States send politicians as ambassadors to deal with questions concerning climate, the poles or oceans without mentioning their codes, while silent glaciologists, doctors of the globe or oceanographers produce exact estimates of the dangers?
Earlier I proposed the creation of a non-international, but global institution where water and air, energy and the earth, living species—in short, Biogea—would be represented. WAFEL would become Biogea’s parliament. But who would speak in this silent parliament? It would be best to move to this subject quickly rather than repeating the above-mentioned arguments. I will do so soon. In any case, it cannot be today’s politicians, whose irrelevance is measured by their ignorance of the things of the world and its voice. Do I have the audacity to say that our politics today is left out of the game with three players? Because of its absence, it has become irrelevant.
The new game with three players requires very different arrangements from political ones. This is why. As soon as the world becomes a global object, it creates a new global subject and a new society facing it: humanity. Globalization today seems to me at least as much the result of the world’s activity as ours. This is a surprise for us Westerners: the new global object acts like a subject. Formerly a passive object, it becomes a determining factor. We leave behind games with two players resulting from the narcissistic relations between our sciences and our societies to engage in a new game with three players, where the world makes the first moves, more forcefully than we do. And as an actual subject. In a few decades, the formerly passive object has become active. As we have seen, the former human subject is becoming dependant on what used to depend on it. This is quite a new development for philosophers of theory and practice! Now we are approaching the tectonic plate announced in the beginning.
The sciences made the world into their object. Nothing was more decisive in the Middle Ages than the invention of those two poles of knowledge: subject-object, unknown to the Ancients. Kant found another way of forgetting the Earth by making it into a metaphor or symbol of all possible objects. He decided that the object turned around the subject as the Earth turned around the Sun. Of course, we illuminated the Earth-object as though we produced as much illumination as the Sun-subject. Which Sun-King became the knowing subject? The Ego, the height of narcissism! Kant also called this second revolution Copernican because it overturned the earlier so-called Ptolemaic system, where the subject turned around the object, just as it was once assumed that the Sun turned around the Earth.
We enter the third of those revolutions, the one I mentioned in the subheading. In little-read texts, despised by many because they chat about religion, old Auguste Comte used to call the planet Earth the Great Fetish. What is the definition of fetish? A God, for sure, often with two bodies, a Lion-Sphinx with a girl’s head, a male with the head of a jackal, surely terrifying, sometimes responsive to our pleading, but venerated by our ancestors even though they had to be aware that it had been fashioned by a woodworker or a sculptor. Those fools confused a clay object with a subject, either in thought or intention. Those imbeciles!
Not so stupid, those ancients, or else we are just as idiotic. Just look at the world. We cannot ignore that in the present anthropocene era, we fashioned it as an object out of our demography, our dishonest appropriations, our plowing and grazing, our technologies, some of whose dimensions are on a par with the world’s, and our practices resulting from our theories. And here we are suddenly panicked because the world is falling on our heads now that it has become a subject! Like a fairy, the fetish terrifies us even though we fashioned it partly with our own hands. I am getting back to my earlier result: yes, we depend on what not long ago depended on us. Will the world throw us into a fetishistic age, like the Market or Finance? (Incidentally, before me, others have considered money as a fetish, like Zola and Marx, like Comte and Hergé in L’Oreille cassée.)
The founder of positivism also said that fetishism constitutes the first step in the human adventure. With such omens, a new era begins, starting with the third revolution. The term anthropocene means nothing else: we used to think of ourselves as the individual or collective subjects of a passive object, the world. Reversal: we become the objects of the new subject Biogea. This is why I have given it a new name. Its voice is almost as loud today as that of the social circus. Even more, while we remain the active subjects of our knowledge and practices we have also become the passive objects of the world’s transformations. As doubles we now have a new relationship like a double link with alternate feedback, with a world as split as we are because as the passive object of our transformations it becomes the active subject of our destiny. This new relationship arose because as subjects, we objectivize the world; in turn, as subject the World objectivizes us. As the subject thrown under our feet, it falls on our heads and becomes the formidable residual reality that keeps us alive, transcends us and can eradicate us. Just as we need to find another word to say “politics,” we must coin two more to describe this double crossed linkage of subject and object of knowledge, action and law. Neither Ptolemaic nor Copernican—our astrophysics could also claim to be neither—or both at the same time, in any case, this new situation guides our future.
Our present crisis has arisen because our cultures and politics are dying from not taking the world into account. An immense era of our history is ending; furthermore, the time of our hominescence begins. Our past will not help us much to dialogue with our new Biogean partner, whose immanence requires a new science, new behaviors and another society. Here lies the profound cause of all our movements.
We still need to listen to what it is saying, as I have just done so clumsily. I’ll try to be more skillful.
1 Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel, François Bourin, 1990; Le Mal propre, Le Pommier, 2008; La Guerre mondiale, Le Pommier, 2008.
2 Le Monde is the daily newspaper of record in France.