26 October 2009
the dialectics of nature
Although I realise there are few conceptual projects more greatly scorned than Engels' attempt to show that dialectical laws are laws of the development of nature, and not vice versa, nevertheless Autumn does seem to have something visibly mediating/mediated about it: all that death in the midst of life...but what a slow and beautiful expiration! The tree outside my window has already deposited so many yellowy, reddish orangey leaves onto the waiting pavement, yet the ones that remain attached to the branches seem so utterly static, not falling at all, except when they do of course. As Engels puts it: all motion is bound up with some change of place.
But it occurs to me that there has indeed been a kind of naive and perhaps unnoticed return to Engels in certain corners of contemporary continental philosophy: tracing politics from the laws of nature, we end up fusing concerns about the environment (apocalypticism, teleology) with desperation about the state of the world as it is (political struggle, a supposed all-pervasive feeling of despair). Everything is presumed, perversely following Heidegger though couched in a resolutely anti-phenomenological rhetoric, to take place on the level of ontology: a strike is as meaningful (or meaningless) as a leaf falling onto the pavement.
On the other hand, a historical materialism (that of late Sartre, for example, or even Firestone when she speaks of it being 'too late' to save nature) that is able to conceive of politics from the standpoint of catastrophe but carries on anyway strikes me as rather more relevant: proliferating ontologies is simply not the point - further, what use is it if it simply becomes a race to the bottom to prove that every entity is as meaningless as every other (besides, the Atomists did it better). Confronting 'what is' has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial. Ontology is play-science for philosophers; I'm pretty much convinced when Badiou argues that mathematics has better ways of conceiving it than philosophy does and that, besides, ontology is not the point. What happens, or what does not happen, should be what concerns us: philosophers sometimes pride themselves on their ignorance of world affairs, again like watered-down Heideggarians, no matter how hostile they think they are to him, pretending that all that history and politics stuff is so, like, ontic, we're working on something much more important here.
But if it's pretty descriptions of nature-as-doom you're after, you can't do much better than Engels himself:
Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.
But you don't see him throwing in the towel and going back to bed, do you...!
