ResearchTime Will Tell: An Interview with Thomas Nail

Time Will Tell: An Interview with Thomas Nail

Thomas Nail is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of seven books; his most recent is Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Congratulations on such an absolutely impressive array of scholarship, and of your dedication to philosophy and beyond in your career and teaching. In other words, for the time it takes to do the level of research, writing, ratiocinating, and creative flow, not to mention hard work, that you undertake. I’ve now read several of your essays and am currently working through Theory of the Image, which has awesome implications for several areas of learning, as does your work Being and Motion where you claim that we are in need of a new theory of ontology specific to motion, that motion has been neglected as ontological and I would agree. You write that movement is in all matters. But your work on Lucretius stands out as well. You have several other impressive books and articles. The back cover of Lucretius I reads: “The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last forty years.” 

Thank you for taking the time to read my work and to talk with me about it.

I’ll be working through it all for a while. I often have the insights and systems of Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze on my mind, and I have taught philosophy courses with success on the U.S. Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, a place where, thankfully, pragmatism and many great artists and revolutionaries, as well as Mexican-American philosophers thrive and Mexican existentialism looms large.

It seems to me, you’re correct that the pairing of violence and the border have normalized in society, into everyday interactions, such as the problems of capitalism and unfair power structures. We are all now on the move, as you write, in multiple ways. As a white European American, my fears regarding anyone labeled foreigner should be suspect, but not the definition of terrorism. As a philosopher of race, I understand white terrorism. You’re a vocal champion of civil human rights and freedom of thought, as well, you write, “transformation of contemporary borders requires a shift in strategies of resistance: from bare life and the confrontations with sovereignty, as Agamben argues, to the concept of a radically inclusive solidarity beyond nations, states, and corporations.”

What role do you place your responsibility to public philosophy in this regard, what do you hope it can help accomplish both now and over time? I start here because it is such an important area to offer one’s insights and you have worked on these topics with great depth, such as in your work Theory of the Border or on the movement of the migrant. Where do we stand today?

In my case, all my work on movement began with a year-long project working with the migrant justice group No One is Illegal in Toronto. It was a transformative experience for me both practically and theoretically. It’s a much more radical and anarchist-inspired movement than most of what goes in in the US and pushes beyond liberal philosophies of citizenship and rights.

I am interested in migrant justice both as an important political (and perhaps even revolutionary) struggle beyond human rights as well as a theoretical project in which we find that the historical expulsion of migrants is one instance in a larger theoretical tradition of explaining motion by something else. Thus a find in the phenomenon of migration a new starting point for political theory.

I hope that my writing, teaching, and activism can play a small part in shifting the present way of thinking about migration away from the notion that it is some kind of political exception that Western countries get to decide on. If migration is understood to be instead, a major constitutive social force throughout history, I hope it means that migrant voices and agency will be included in the social processes they themselves help to build and reproduce. Those who contribute socially and are affected socially should have the right to determine how they are affected socially. Currently, we are living in a global apartheid in which millions of migrants who form the backbones of so many social and economic systems are treated as if they are nothing or as if they were “illegal.” 

The classes I teach on migration are constant damage control against all the myths the students come in with and the nonsense Trump keeps saying every week. In the future, I have plans to take students to do activist work on the US/Mexico border. 

Where do we stand today? In a terrible place. Any serious move forward needs to begin with the premise of equality, solidarity, and inclusion of all people regardless of status. Moving forward means everyone gets a voice, not just citizens coming up with solutions for “immigration reform.” 

It’s horrific. I also do a lot of damage control on race and gender, class, about borders, theoretically and otherwise, in my university classes. A new starting point and perspective for political theory as the study of movement would be a new wave of philosophy. One that would be supportive and affirmative I hope. I really appreciate how you apply theory with practice. I’m reminded here of Albert Memmi’s notes on “cultural lethargy,” “solidarity of the vanquished,” and “the new world” in Decolonization and the Decolonized.

In your work on Lucretius, you write, “Just as the corpora create space and time through motion, so they also create weight by their motion” (190)? Can you elaborate a little on this? What is time for Lucretius in your reading and why are we, rightfully, returning to reading his theories?  You also write, “Time, for Lucretius, is nothing apart from the relative motion, rest, and sensation of things…” (111) This page of your work reminds me of Spinoza’s Ethics. I understand the connection to some of your work on Being and Motion, and I have yet to unpack it, reading slowly, but it has serious overlaps with Spinoza’s dynamic epistemology and ontology of motion. They seem to be friends.

One of the things that is so interesting to me about Lucretius is that he is one of the few in the Western tradition that is willing to say, “matter moves” without needing any higher explanation for its motion. There is no trace of transcendence whatsoever in his work. For Lucretius, the indeterminate movement of matter does not occur in space and time (which would precede motion) but produces space and time itself. Movement is thus not movement from point A to point B (points in space traversed over time)—it is the process that produces the line and points AB in the first place. If this sounds Bergsonian it is because Lucretius’ was Bergson’s first intellectual love. Bergson’s first book was a line by line Greek and Latin commentary on Lucretius’ great poem De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things). If Lucretius also sounds a bit like Spinoza it is because Spinoza got his materialism from De Rerum Natura. The first sections of book two of Spinoza’s Ethics are basically just a summary of Lucretius. 

The difference, however, is that Bergson and Spinoza are vitalists: Bergson has an élan vital and Spinoza has his conatus—neither of which have any equivalent in Lucretius. For Lucretius, matter moves without any exterior cause or immanent life force, energy, or power. In Bergson and Spinoza you have a vitalist materialism that runs through to Deleuze and into contemporary vitalist new materialism. In Lucretius, however, you find a distinct kinetic materialism where nature is just matter in motion—thats it. So yes, they are all friends in a sense but with this important difference. 

Neo-vitalists might say to this point: “yes, but force and vitality do not transcend matter as they do in early modern vitalism. They are immanent to matter. Movement is just another word for vital energy.” My reply would be: “if vital energy is strictly identical to movement than why did Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others need to add vitalistic terms at all?” What work does “vitality” do for our materialism that was not already in Lucretius’ non-vitalistic materialism? At the very least vitalistic language adds nothing to immanent materialism in my opinion. At the most, however, it takes a metaphysically burdened and political problematic term like “life,” which is such a tiny fraction of the universe and has been used to justify so much violence against non-life and then uses it to give matter back its agency—as if matter needed “life” to have agency. The universe is not just vital and creative; it is also destructive and non-living (in fact it is mostly this). But then if you want a concept of vitality without tying it to life (and all its problems) and without any suggestion of being ontologically distinct from matter, then why even use this term in the first place? Most of the criticisms of new materialism have been aimed at this vitalist version of it. Its too bad. I hope we do not have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Vitalism is unnecessary and even potentially dangerous for new materialism and so I am on the side of Karen Barad and Mel Chen, who have explicitly (although usually in footnotes) rejected any form of vitalism in their versions of new materialism.      

Time, like force, for me, is another historical instance of philosophers and scientists trying to explain why matter moves. Force was popular in the early modern period and time was popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most ontologies and theories of time treat time as the ultimate a priori of nature (or of human existence). Historically, this was supported by Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the 20th century, even though there were still exceptional “singularities” (in black holes for example) left unexplained by that theory. Matter, in general relaitivity, moves across a pre-existing curved spacetime. If quantum theory is correct, however, there should be a quantum theory of gravity (space and time) in which spacetime emerges from the laws of quantum mechanics. In particular, how energetic vibrations below the level of space and time produce space and time like ripples on the surface of a pond. 

This is the present assumption of most contemporary theoretical physics—even if the formalisms of “quantum gravity” have yet to be experimentally verified. The race is on to prove them. Lucretius was already the precursor of this idea two thousand years ago: matter produces space and time through its indeterminate motion. In other words, I think we have finally come back to Lucretius. Philosophers need to keep up with what is happening in the sciences (and scientists should keep up with poetry, like Lucretius). My thought is of course that quantum gravity is possibility an indication that it is time to shift focus from ontologies of time to ontologies of motion. Its time to consider a new perspective. This is not because I think “being is motion” forever and all time, but that historically, this is our present limit of thought. I am not a dogmatist or metaphysician. If we discover something in the universe that is completely static, I am open to being wrong. This is what I mean by “historical ontology.” As things change we rework our ontologies of the present from within the present. Ontology is a performative practice—this is a key thesis in Being and Motion.  

Op, I’ll have to beg to differ slightly on there being no “equivalent in Lucretius” to Spinoza, especially if both systems are motion and then motion once more, as Wim Klever wrote, but we can table that one for a later discussion, maybe at a SPEP conference. 

I would agree with you that we need to shift to ontologies of motion and take on relevant new perspectives. As you’ll read in the other interviews in this series, the discussion of time remains current as it accompanies a changing world of quantum physics meets energy mechanics and more. 

There are a lot of questions to ask you about, from the history of aesthetics you cover in Theory of the Image to more affirmative, productive ways to produces affects, especially the affects related to continued understanding, motion, shared communities. It’s fun to point out that I had Mike Witmore as a professor for Lucretius on the history of matter at CMU and Duquesne University, along with Dan Selcer, a decade ago. Witmore runs the Shakespeare archive in D.C. They co-taught their grads about several of these connections that you are also supporting in your otherwise very original work. I don’t mind dropping those names in this context. They made all their grads carry around that little red book every day. Excellent, creative teachers. We were fortunate… 

More specifically, to follow-up with what you say above, what is time for you? Several trusted scholars have said your work on the ontology of motion is on the level and scope of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Additional accolades are in order here, so I pause only to ask how you feel your ontology of motion differs or is unique and how you think personally about time?

Time, for me, is the kinetic dissipation of matter. I will not say entropy, because entropy typically assumes random motion (which I disagree for reasons described in Being and Motion). Matter tends to move from more dense to less dense regions and this provides the arrow of time that we experience as regional beings. However, time is not ontologically chronological because if time is fully material then it does not go “away” outside the universe into some non-existent “past.” There is no evidence that there is any such outside to the universe. So, the past is still with us in the immanent material that we are and in the universe more broadly. The future too, is here in the matter that we (and nature) are. So time is, as Bergson said in his final lectures, Le pensée et le mouvant, nothing but movement: the transformation or redistribution of an open whole. At every moment the entire universe kinetically transforms its entire distribution of space and time. There simply is no static nature to which the present can refer to as “past nature.” The whole thing is continually different to itself—but tending regionally toward energetic dissipation.  

In my reading, Lucretius was right about the primacy of movement instead of time. Deleuze, however, gets very close, but ends up favoring the vitalist tradition I just described. This keeps him from having a kinetic theory of time. For example, in Difference and Repetition he explicitly subordinates movement to time: “The [third] synthesis is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change” (DR, 89). In Logic of Sense, the subordination of movement and matter to time is explicit in his theory of “an empty form of time, independent of all matter” (LS, 62). Deleuze explicitly places time above matter and motion and I do not. 

What is unique about Being and Motion is that it is the first history of the philosophy of motion and it is the first systematic ontology of motion. I owe a great debt to Lucretius, Marx, Bergson, Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Deleuze, and others, but in the end my philosophy has its own method, concepts, and conclusions. Its too hard to summarize here but in place of reading the first few chapters of Being and Motion I think I might say that it is the first ontology of motion to take the material practice of ontology itself as the subject of historical inquiry.    

Yes, cronos. There’s new work being done on time on Deleuze in philosophy and film studies currently. Another great discussion for some time in the future.

With your work as the first history of the philosophy of motion you have made a lasting contribution to the history of philosophy. Yes, Bergson writes that time is movement and must be conceived as both duration and simultaneity as well. Others in this series will agree with you that time is not ontologically chronological, but not necessarily that there’s no ‘outside’ of the universe. I understand, logically, that we cannot posit an ‘outside’ the universe, but we are forced to consider anomalies regardless of their fit with our logics of the times when we are faced with mounting evidence.

So, you don’t interpret the swerve in Lucretius as a random motion? No chance?

I am open to hearing evidence for an outside to the universe, but I have no idea what that would even look like. In part, because the universe is not a whole but an expanding and open process—just as Lucretius described in De Rerum Natura. I believe there is genuine novelty in the universe but we do not need to posit randomness to get that novelty. Lucretius says that matter is always in the habit [solerent] of swerving. There are at least two typical ideas of randomness neither of which Lucretius’ view could support. The first one is a radical randomness, or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “hyperchaos,” which is complete ex nihilo creation from nothing. Lucreitus is explicit that “nil posse creari de nihilo” [nothing can be created from nothing]. The second kind of randomness is the constrained definition randomness where there is a closed domain of objects and matter moves randomly within that. Again, Lucretius is explicit that nature is not a finite closed system—and so there cannot be randomness in this sense either. Something always comes from something relationally but creatively and non-deterministically. 

In the Lucretius work you describe the “sensation of temporality…” I realize the sensation of temporality as an experience, especially in this advancing techno-logical and yet irrational world, differs from the motion of sensations as process and/or as concept, and how all of these categories can be read divergently, with differing logics, including the logic of sensation some might say… On this note, do you feel we have new forms of logic and deduction being produced because of the material conditions we are embedded within, such as your kinetic understanding of bio-politics and the migrant-in-motion? Understanding acutely that we are finite, but believing that we are also infinite, would you say our time is limited? 

In one sense our lives as we experience them are absolutely finite and follow the dissipation of the universe more generally. In another sense, the matter that flows and dissipates through us will eventually be broken down by black holes at the end of the universe. None of it though will be destroyed. Not infinite in any metaphysical sense, but at least indefinite. Lucretius understood the first two laws of thermodynamics well before their modern formalization by Boltzmann.  

Matter can dissipate faster or slower; we can try and speed it up or slow it down in our little region. Lucretius II is all about the ethics of going with this flow instead of trying to slow it down to avoid death and accumulate. 

I worked a little on the second law of thermodynamics in my MA thesis. You’re right about Lucretius preceding Boltzmann, and Bergson also preceded some of Einstein. Another exciting element in Bergson, at the start of his The Creative Mind, is where he writes that there are two forms of possibility, of what is possible. One is what is possible based on the elements and ideas, materials, and movements between already in existence, and the other cannot be predicted because, as he says, we do not know what questions and interest(s) future generations will have or desire.

Yes, exactly! Great connection. Relational possibility without probability or ex nihilo emergence. Its all in Lucretius’ swerve.

Being Continentally trained, but interested in all philosophical and interdisciplinary methodologies and most if not all philosophers, as much as it would be fantastic to ask you about more of your earlier work, which has been described as scholarship that will be studied for decades: “Carefully argued, well informed, hugely ambitious, and analytically precise, it will become a standard reference for years to come.” How can new students approach your work on motion since it is related to some forms of time even if not all, or even if that relation is a flow by which various aggregates and encounters then unfold in time? 

I would suggest to folks interested in my work to start with the area they are interested in and go from there. If you are interested in ontology read at least Book I of Being and Motion; if art and aesthetics, then start with Theory of the Image; if politics than The Figure of the Migrant and Theory of the Border; if science then Theory of the Object; if natural history, climate change, and the Anthropocene than Theory of the Earth; if Lucretius, Marx, or Woolf, then start with those books. Once all these books are out I would like to write a more general “Introduction to the Philosophy of Motion” at some point.  

Two free copies of Theory of the Image showed up at my home in 2018 on Preservation Way last year from an unknown source! At the moment, as I also really crack open BM by audio book while moving, I’m enjoying thinking through the Greek idea that the concrete derives from the abstract, such as your comments on kinetic inversion, model, and mold. The work is also pragmatically incredibly useful for undergraduate courses.

In most of your professional career, you write on migration, borders, evolving definitions of community, and, more recently at the end of 2019, new materialism(s). You support ethics in these ways, putting forth new definitions or emphasizing those that already were there but did not create a more unifying theory about nature in motion. Would you mind elaborating on how the new materialisms essay that appeared recently in Angeliki, as you and your co-authors write that there is “no single definition of new materialism” and how this theory works in conjunction with your understanding of time and motion above?

At the University of Oregon I studied political philosophy, environmental philosophy, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, post-structuralism, and was a political activist. I wrote my dissertation on the theme of political revolution in Deleuze and Guattari and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. This research was the foundation of my first book, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo, published in 2012.

After graduate school I worked on what I felt was politically important at that moment: the struggle of migrants under neoliberal capitalism—partly inspired by Alain Badiou’s activism and the some very rousing articles by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciére on the political importance of the sans papiers. Starting here but digging deeper into the history of migration confirmed for me that migrants have actually always been central figures. This led me to see broader connections between historical structures or patterns of movement and their relation to the structures of ontology, art, science, and nature during those times. But since not much was written about this history of motion or migration from my favorite French philosophers I had to create my own kind of method and take tools from where I could (Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, etc). This was a time of creativity for me.   

While I was writing these political books the first texts on new materialism were just coming out. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman published the first collection of essays on feminist new materialism in 2010 and over the next five years, around the time I had completed writing the political books (c. 2015) more people were talking about “new materialism” and tracing its linage to Spinoza and Deleuze (two central figures from my graduate education). Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti’s feminism always inspired me and they started writing about new materialism, along with Manuel Delanda. It seemed like all the Deleuzians were suddenly talking about materialism but it was still extremely unclear what it was all about and if it was just a new name for what Deleuze had already been doing. 

Around this time I also started taking long walks in the park at night every two weeks with my friends and colleagues Josh Hanan and Chris Gamble. Josh had come to new materialism from Foucault, Chris from Derrida, and me from Deleuze. Chris introduced me to Karen Barad’s work. Over a couple years, we read all the literature that was coming out, and talked about it, and concluded it was quite a mess to figure out all the similarities and differences between vitalist new materialism, object oriented ontology, speculative realism, old materialisms, and performative new materialism. Most articles out there conflate these really different approaches. So over the course of two years we tried hard to figure it all out in hopes of moving the conversation forward—specifically in favor of what we identify as performative new materialism. We gave several lectures at the University of Denver and eventually published our essay with Angelaki as “What is New Materialism?”. 

During these years I also started to see that my previous research on patterns of motion was actually compatible with the version of new materialism we were moving toward. It was non-anthropocentric (due to the influence of Deleuze) but it was also pretty historical and materialist (due to the influence of Marx and Foucault). So, although I do not use the term “new materialist” in The Figure of the Migrant (2015) and Theory of the Border (2016), I do think they are fully consistent with my kinetic new materialism which I describe explicitly in Being and Motion (2018) and Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (2018). Everything I have published after 2016 explicitly identifies with the term “new materialist” and is consistent with my critique of vitalism (mentioned above).

The term “new materialism” remains contested with multiple definitions—each with a number difficulties that we discuss in the paper, but I think it is still worth preceding with, at least provisionally. The philosophy of movement and the kinetic theory of time developed in Being and Motion (and discussed a bit above) are a direct result of trying to develop a form of new materialism without vitalism or temporal reductions.       

That’s a delightful story. John Kaag and others have been philosophizing a lot the past few years on walking, sauntering, and nature, something I don’t think is self-absorbed at all. I like the work of Balibar, his Spinoza influences, and Ranciere, especially, but also Haraway and Rosi Braidotti’s work. DeLanda has been a personal fav since early years of graduate school. I can understand why and how you would draw these connections and incorporate them into your life. I was around in the first years of Object Oriented Ontology and Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics. I traveled to the outskirts of England on a Sunday once to hang with Ray Brassier at a pub. We talked for over four hours. I think we can both agree that these movements the past two decades have created new areas of studying philosophy that are beneficial. It feels similarly the case in the philosophy of race, various feminisms and womanisms, and the explosion of areas like the philosophy of film. Together, these areas are contributing in many ways to how we all ‘do’ philosophy and on how we teach.

In the opening of H.G. Wells’ story The Time Machine, the time traveler reveals, in a philosophical discussion, that time is simply “only real for those in 3-D space…” that human consciousness needs time to flow the way we perceive or might think it does, need it to. What role do you assign to human consciousness, the hard problem as they say, as it (we) evolve, join in, if you will, with the future? Perhaps a comment or two about your work Being and Motion could help readers, as a “historical and regional ontology.”

I do not think that time is merely an effect of consciousness. I am a realist. I think time is real. I also think time (following Lucretius and Carlo Rovelli) is a product or effect of matter in motion—specifically the dissipation of motion that defines the universe. Time is just the name for the kinetic transformation of the entire universe as an open process. 

I like that definition. Beyond the biological necessity, our experiences of daily space and time that we must pay attention to for survival, which is also based on gravity and walking upright, among other laws, aren’t there new questions about time with the discovery and proof of the Simulation Theory (more than just 0s & 1s), predictions about advanced AI (here to stay & will be more intelligent than humans), and related new ways in which we can go about space and time? 

For example, you write that in a world of advancing digitization and images, all images are a part of electric flows. What if electricity or those electric flows, in some energetic way, reach beyond the speed of light? Then what do we do with our more linear logics? Hegel, DeLanda, Blanchot, come to mind here, and others who write on different kinds of logics.

Interesting line of thought here but the hypothesis that the universe is a computer simulation is science fiction and not really a testable hypothesis. Predictions about AI are similarly speculative. Electricity is made of photons and electrons. The photons travel at the speed of light and electrons move a bit more slowly through transistor gates to produce digital images. There is currently no evidence to suggest that anything in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light or that anything ever will. This is a key principle of general relativity, Planck’s constant, and the standard model of quantum mechanics. Any form of logic that assumes a priori the principle of non-contradiction needs to be revised in light of quantum indeterminacy. Category theory, for example, does not assume such a logic and is thus in some ways a better fit for quantum reality that other forms of logic and mathematics.    

Well, I might not say “no evidence,” but I understand the paradigm we are in currently and that you are correct. Photons also carry information and there’s some interesting work being done currently on neutrinos. Quantum computing and advanced AI are creating teams of their own. Amir Husain is one AI researcher leading the way.

Thank you for supporting the conclusion, “Any form of logic that assumes a priori the principle of non-contradiction needs to be revised in light of quantum indeterminacy.” There is a reading of Spinoza that I disagree with that I worked on for the doctoral research that would, at least in part, support this conclusion. It causes some logical complications for theories of representation and Spinoza.

As philosophers of motion are always interested in philosophy of physics, some physicists now call dark matter “another type of matter,” and their newest discoveries are demonstrating we know less than we thought about the universe. In this context, what is an ‘idea’ about matter if matter can change in some of its natural properties? For example, 2011 Nobel Prize winning physicists deduced that our universe is ‘skattering,’ the energy of repulsion, going against the force of gravity, etc… and then our kind of material laws of nature pulling things back in through their own forces…apparently both are occurring, we are not only expanding. Logically, aren’t folds in nature, as well as its elasticity, more like involutions at times rather than expansions? We know that 5% are atoms, 23% dark matter, & 72% is dark energy and so forth… 

Do we produce, while in motion in every way, an interaction with only 5% of the universe, for example, or are there better ways to think about this? Can we truly think about dark matter if, in a real sense, it is outside of time in its ever more far reaching metaphysics? Isn’t one of the only ways in here to conceive of certain encounters with human ideas as eternal in some sense, the infinite in the finite if you will? You write that our new discoveries in quantum gravity and cosmology are in need of more accurate paradigm, a “new historical ontology for the twenty-first century.” You seem to state clearly “humans are, after all, matter with the capacity for creating new ontological descriptions and inscriptions.” (65-66)

Yes, I think materialist philosophers should take physics and all the sciences seriously. This does not mean we should merely accept (or merely reject) interpretations and concepts that come from working scientists. We should follow the work as closely as we can and contribute our interpretations alongside theirs and participate in the development of knowledge. Knowing nothing about contemporary science and technology should not be a badge of humanist honor.

Dark energy, in my understanding of the literature, is not a new “type” of matter—but is simply the indeterminate fluctuation of quantum fields (which make up all matter) operating and exerting gravitational pull on very large scales in the universe [the so-called cosmological constant]. It is responsible for pulling the universe out in all directions (although obviously there are a lot of other gravitational movements at work as well, as you say). What remains puzzling is that there should be a lot more of it given the rate of cosmic expansion. In any case, dark matter and energy are not outside time but time is an immanent result of material quantum fluctuations (at least according to quantum gravity theory). 

You are absolutely right that dark energy (i.e. quantum fluctuations) pose a challenge to ideas of matter as passive or mechanical. Karen Barad has written beautiful on this. Chris Gamble and I have an article coming out in Rhizomes called “Blackhole Materialism” that shows precisely where quantum gravity and “black hole indeterminacy” can support a new theory of indeterminate materialism.    

I am not sure what you mean by eternal human ideas; I remain agnostic on metaphysical issues like eternity. I think we should keep our ontologies historical and positional—and not let them turn into grand theories of being forever and all time. 

I’m not sure if I knew Barad’s work or not, but definitely appreciate all of these references and good to know. That’s some fun news too. I look forward to that essay with anticipation. When I think of the infinite I sometimes also think of eternity and various formulations of what dark matter or energy might actually be doing, but I don’t think of concepts of eternity as ‘forever,’ although I understand there is a universal conception like it in most religions, for better and worse. Not all theories of eternity are terrible, especially if someday we have more evidence for that which pushes the infinite into itself, makes it infinite infinitely if you will, etc. It’s ok, at least for me, to pay rational attention to the possibility (and probability) that there is both the historical and positional or the more metaphysical, if you will. They are connected, related, or involve each other at least, for me. If something can be proven to timeless then the concept of teleology is not relevant logically, as one example.

What if it is scientifically possible to time travel after-all, as Einstein believed he mathematically proved? You would need some seriously trusted math for this kind of machine, but we’ll have the quantum computing resources and the interest. Are you in? Would you sign up for a round trip? Well, it wouldn’t exactly be round, but you could go and come back if desired. You write that we miss the most important and fundamental element of our era if we do not pay closer attention to motion, and not to space and time. I believe your logic for a theory of motion is revolutionary, but I really want to know if you’ll get in that time machine? 

In a real way, we are already in a time machine. We are made of burned out stars from billions of years ago. The past is fully active and immanent within us. The end of the universe will be made of the particles and quantum fields that once made up our bodies. The future too is already here in another arrangement. We are the past and the future.

Yes, yes! As Nietzsche would say. We are all star dust, star dust and energy. I love that there are logical ways to conceive of ourselves as already in a time machine. Bergson also says as much often, in his own ways, but what you add is dynamic, pragmatically relevant, a real tool we can all use to think and do. 

Can you speak about revolution today in addition to your work on ontology, art, philosophy and science? I understand it’s a big topic, but I would also say that it’s a pressing one… As great art or philosophy take real time, as another example, and as we need better theories about how singularities organize and create more powerful affects, as you’ve noted, what are your impressions about the directions we will benefit from taking up other than the options of only war or dialogue? 

Before we can say anything about revolution “is” we really need to make sure everyone affected is invited to participate in the meaning of this term today. Before we can talk about “benefit” for who we have to listen and help create the whole “we.” That in itself is a huge task—the ongoing immanent preconditions of inclusive revolution. This is particularly difficult today in the context of right wing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in many Western countries and in recent climate summits where indigenous voices are being ignored. The form revolutionary movements take depends on who is involved. This is one of the reasons why the struggle for migrant and indigenous political agency is so important. These are groups on the front lines of global primitive accumulation and climate change. Their voices need to be heard and supported. Theory cannot dictate or predict the emergence of new historical forms in art, politics, science, or ontology. Theorists, I think, should be there to help in their own way, alongside everyone else without any special access to what revolution is or will be. My political work is less as an unchanging theory of the being of revolution but a historical description of what it has looked like in certain places and what it is starting to look like today as a mixture of these previous historical formations. We can learn a lot from Zapatismo and the long history of migrant struggles in particular. But we still have to “make the road by walking,” or, as the Zapatistas say, “caminar preguntando” [Walking, we question]. 

Chris Rawls

Chris Rawls teaches philosophy full time at Roger Williams University. Chris received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2015 from Duquesne University writing on Spinoza’s dynamic epistemology. Chris recently co-edited an interdisciplinary anthology Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides with Routledge Press’s series Research on Aesthetics (an experiment for the ages!) with Diana Nieva and Steven Gouveia. Chris also studies/teaches within the Critical Philosophy of Race and Whiteness Studies since 2006 and helped co-found the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) archive at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Theory, Brown University.

Thomas Nail

Thomas Nail is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of seven books; his most recent is Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019). https://www.du.edu/ahss/philosophy/faculty_staff/nail_thomas.html

15 COMMENTS

  1. “At the most, however, it takes a metaphysically burdened and political problematic term like “life,” which is such a tiny fraction of the universe and has been used to justify so much violence against non-life and then uses it to give matter back its agency—as if matter needed “life” to have agency.”

    I guess it depends on what you mean by “agency.” Living beings have internal processes that drive activities keeping them alive. We humans, with many, many synapses between input and output, make decisions about what we do, many of which affect whether or not we stay alive, as well as the ways in which we maintain that life. Most of us do, in fact, seem to care about whether or not we continue to stay alive. Other highly evolved forms seem to do so as well, although they possess lesser degrees of choice and manifest far less destructive power than we do. Currently many of our collective human activities are undermining the integrity of the Biosphere that keeps us all alive, but so far we have not managed to engage the agency required to transform our global society into something more sustainable.

    Your mental gymnastics on these conceptual monkeybars are quite impressive, but an expressed concern about “violence against non-life” seems hardly appropriate in an era of extreme anthropogenic violence unleashed against evolved Holocene Life on Earth, notwithstanding the fact that it is “such a tiny fraction of the universe”—it’s the tiny fraction that just happens to encompass all of us beings able to engage in such philosophizing. Efforts aimed at enhancing our ability to exert intelligent human agency, rather than demeaning it, would appear to be called for at this time. Moreover, I find the entire effort to disavow the centrality of Life in all our human endeavors to be more than a little disingenuous; perhaps you will see things differently when you yourself finally have to confront the existential possibility of non-Life, in the form of your own impending death.

    • Thank you for your understanding. Thomas & I are both mad humanitarians whose lives have been put in danger, repeatedly, at least for me but I do not speak for others either. Perhaps a reread would help, but your interest, time, & dedication to sustaining all life, including the planet, aligns with ours as well and the interests of the APA too it seems.

      • Dear Chris Rawls—

        I’m sorry to hear that your life and that of Professor Nail have been in danger; I assume this is due to your activist work on behalf of migrants and indigenous people, and I wish you all the best in its continuance. However, my comment was directed to Professor Nail, since in this interview he is primarily addressing issues of “new historical forms” in ontology.

        Upon performing several rereads of the paragraph that is of most concern to me, I find that I continue to have questions regarding the good professor’s position. For instance, what is meant by “violence against non-life”—could some specific examples be provided? And, again, what is the definition of the word “agency”? And then, where it is noted that, to the neo-vitalists, who are said to equate “vital energy” with “movement,” the question is posed: “if vital energy is strictly identical to movement th[e]n why did Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others need to add vitalistic terms at all?”

        I cannot speak for the “neovitalists,” although I have long thought that the term “vitalism” should be rehabilitated as a much-needed contrast term to “mechanism,” but I would answer the question by pointing out that, with living organisms, the impulse that generates movement comes from within, a manifestation of the “constant striving” keeping these autopoietic systems alive—from the gross anatomical movements of animals, to the probing of plants for water, nutrients and light, to the constant molecular motion of all cellular metabolism, biochemical pathways that are fundamentally the same across the board—and this internally generated motion is absent in the nonliving world, where, by the laws of “mechanism,” “nature IS just matter in motion,” externally propelled. Why would Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche and others need to add vitalistic terms? Because this inner striving of Life toward growth, self-maintenance, and self transcendence is quite an obvious property of all and only living things. There doesn’t need to be anything “woo-woo” about it, it just is; moreover, it is something quite obvious to a five-year old child, but it seems it takes a certain kind of academic philosopher to deny the obvious fact of its existence. I’m curious as to why.

        Of course, if you allow basic metabolism as one of the defining characteristics of Life, then you are already admitting that “there is always something going on inside”—which opens up the door for acknowledging the existence of some kind of sentience “all the way down,” starting with rudimentary ways of perceiving changes in the outside environment and responding appropriately, then following continuous lines of evolutionary development “all the way up” to us and a number of other highly cognitively developed beings with whom we happen to share the planet. Schopenhauer maintained that “the will to live” was fundamentally the same in all of us living things, and that we therefore have an immediate experience of it within ourselves; we know what it means for our strivings to be frustrated and for our interests to be harmed—hence the emergence of “ethics.” Could you say similar things about any nonliving kind of “matter in motion”?

        I have observed, however, that a peculiar blindness to this “vitality” of the living, if not an indifference to what happens to nonhuman forms of life (for some reason an exception always seems to be made for the human case), seems to be reflected in the works of contemporary philosophers who have developed a degree of familiarity with physics but not with biology, whereas those that are more biologically literate tend to exhibit a considerable degree of biophilia as well—no doubt it self-selects? At any rate, I would be very interested in how my inquiries here would be answered by Professor Nails. I do think the time is ripe for a well-integrated ontology that is consistent with what we know from biological science as well as with what we know from our own experience as living beings, since an awful lot of us still seem to believe we’re trapped in the desolate world of mechanistic determinism, and by believing it, keep us there. But if “kinetic materialism” is what defines our ontology, then why, Chris, would you and Thomas be “dedicated to sustaining all life” in the first place? If we all die tomorrow, there will still be “matter in motion,” right?

        • If you wish to engage with Prof. Nail he is easy to find and very generous.
          Personally, I not only believe in vitalism and all related, but I also study the knowledge and gifts of folks like Suzanne Giesemann, who is studied by scientists today. All is energy, inorganic and organic alike, IMHO. There’s more yet to this story.

  2. The APA Blog editors have agreed to correct any typos within the interview, which were not present in the final draft to be published. Our apologies.

  3. This was really refreshing to read. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but the sensibility involved in the discussion and in the work made me want to go and order some of Thomas’s books. I think I’ll start with Marx in Motion. Thanks to you both for doing this interview.

  4. Thanks for your questions and taking the time to engage. I have a book coming out that proposes a process philosophy of biology and origins of life, animality, plants, etc. in a few months. Its called Theory of the Earth, https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33107 I think you will find an extended answer to your questions there. Just because life is a small portion of the cosmos and the mass of the earth does not mean it is ethically unimportant for us here and now. But that is an obvious conclusion that we do not need ontological vitalism to get to. Its easy to deduce the relative importance of life in Earth’s history without neo-vitalism.

    • My sense from Hawkins’ questions is that Hawkins is pressing on the connection between moral and ontological reasons (possibly, between is and ought). I’d like to hear you address the relationship more. From the little I’ve read so far of your work (I ordered five of your books and began looking into them), I am unclear about the distinction and the relation between these kinds of reasons. Suppose that we drop “isms” and talk about a particular matter, for instance, how we ought to approach the likelihood that we are in the front end of the sixth mass extinction. How would your ontology help us understand our moral responsibility in the face of that geological event?

      • Thanks, Jeremy. I am afraid I cannot answer your question in a short comment, but this is the focus topic of Theory of the Earth https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33107, which will be out in the next month or two. A short answer would be that there are no “oughts” in nature, and anyone pretending that there are may be sneaking something in, and we should keep up our Nietzschean suspicion about them. But this does not mean that there are not what I call “hypothetical ethical” concerns such as “IF humans want to survive and want other forms of life to survive and flourish THEN they ought to do such and such.” In my view, this is a practical question and not a metaphysical or moral one. If its practical, then we need to know what is going on in the cosmos and on our planet and how we fit into that larger ecological structure. Capitalism, for example, is not evil or unnatural; it’s like cancer. It isn’t good for almost all of us IF we want to live and flourish. We do not need moral philosophy to figure that out. The key thing I think we still have upsidedown at this point is that we think human preservation and flourishing are about the conservation of energy and life. This way of thinking results from the chain of being where stasis is above motion and life above death. This is an ontological issue. It’s also deeply anthropocentric. But planetary and even cosmic flourishing are about dissipation. This is what Theory of the Earth is all about. I can’t fully explain this idea here, but I wrote an article here on it https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/11/the-earth-is-dying-but-not-fast-enough/ . That is probably not satisfying, but the problem requires a long-form response because it matters where you start telling the story and I think we need to shift our starting point to one of movement and dissipation. Then we will have a better sense of what it takes to live and flourish on this planet.

        • Dear Thomas, Thanks for your time. I want to say, “sure,” but the story you’re sketching is too big picture for me to see how it relates to moral judgment. It seems to make some good casuistical points, though — useful to remember.

          What do you mean by the moral? And do you think decision making is mainly a matter of calculative judgments? How do you understand interpersonal obligations and accountability between people?

          No need to reply here, since the questions are big. But I wanted to ask them. Perhaps some day we’ll be able to talk at more length.

  5. My attention was drawn to these recent posts, so I went to the Counterpunch essay to get a better idea about what kind of position was being taken here, and frankly, I came away shocked. I am sorry to be so critical, but my first reaction to this essay’s rather shameless display of an utter lack of biological insight into the ecological processes that maintain the Biosphere was to wonder if the author has ever had any conversations with the University of Denver’s biology faculty. It would take a considerably longer piece of writing than I wish to engage in here just to critique the essay, let alone to slog through several book-length expositions, but I feel kind of obligated to make a few quick remarks at this time.

    Professor Nail, I do mean this to be constructive criticism, but I must be blunt, hoping you can respond in a way that will at least clarify how we could have come to hold such differing positions on some very important issues. If I were to try to describe the central flaw in all of what I have read so far, I would sum it up like this: the overall approach suffers from extreme reductionism. You have, at one stroke, “reduced” pretty much everything in the universe down to bare matter and energy, “matter in motion”—simply dismissing all the many, many layers of complexity manifested in the patterns of LIVING matter in motion, patterns which are quite distinctive, if vanishingly rare, within the infinitely larger cosmos—the abstracted, indifferent (and imaginary) perspective which you seem to be so fond of taking.

    I think we need to recognize a very important connection between “is” and “ought,” and, as I noted in an earlier comment, it has to everything do with this uniqueness of living beings: that essentially all the patterns of, if you will, “energy usage” in living beings are fundamentally geared toward maintaining life–even though that life, for an individual living being, necessarily must come to its end eventually. Maintaining that life requires, in terms of “processes,” energy patterns that maintain the organism within certain metabolic parameters, and, at least in certain cognitively developed species, serve to maintain an internal state that is aware of and responsive to what’s around it. Observations seem to demonstrate a teleological orientation on the part of organisms, a striving toward the goal of maintaining life and its attendant processes, and we ourselves, as living organisms, in fact generally do seem to take proper life-maintenance as quite a central goal. But external factors acting on a living being can interfere with these life processes, sometimes disabling and even terminating them; thus it makes sense to say that living beings–unlike any other sort of material constellation we are aware of as yet–can be benefitted or harmed with respect to this internally-generated fundamental goal. Thus our ontology–the ontology of LIFE–does directly connect with our ethics—which concerns making decisions about our agency, the ways in which, and the extent to which, we further or frustrate this fundamental goal that exists (it is ontologically “real”) in the other living beings our actions affect. Deciding just how to demarcate these “other living beings” opens up another whole can of worms, but as far as I’m concerned, Kenneth Goodpaster got the ontological-ethical connection right in his essay “On Being Morally Considerable” way back in 1978—it’s LIFE that makes the difference. If you have disagreements with this, I’d like to see what they are—assuming that you keep the topic open to life itself and don’t just automatically “reduce” it down to human life, or if you do, you offer a biologically-justifiable defense of that reduction.

    Now I’d like to say something about the issue raised by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer: how we ought to approach the likelihood that we are in the front end of the sixth mass extinction. I notice that Professor Nail references the article by Bar-On, Phillips and Milo (2018), apparently to emphasize that, in comparison with the entire Biosphere, we humans make up only a very small fraction of the total amount of biomass on the planet, seemingly to illustrate how little what we do matters in the larger scheme of things. But if you look more carefully at that article, you will find that, taken altogether, we humans—now more than 7 billion of us and counting—are estimated to have a biomass of 0.06 gigatons of carbon (GtC), our livestock 0.10 GtC, and all the other wild mammals remaining on Earth taken together only 0.007 GtC—in other words, of all our closest evolutionary relatives, the mammals—including the highly sentient animals with whom we co-evolved, who arguably have some moral claim on us, and who have undoubtedly been “harmed” by our takeover of their bodies and their habitat—all of them that remain living wild, together, would make up only about 4% of the mass of us plus our domesticated animals. Moreover, if you subtract the biomass of the great whales and other marine mammals, the biomass of all the wild land mammals together is estimated at only 0.003 GtC, or about 5% of our human biomass alone, and less than 2% of the biomass of us plus our livestock. We have truly taken over the globe. And sadly, we are continuing to do so, harming and killing countless individual living organisms of all types, some of them undeniably suffering, in the process—and yes, we are bringing on the sixth major extinction spasm in the history of Life on Earth. It is hard to get one’s mind around the enormity of what we’ve done and are still doing, both ontologically and ethically.

    Much of the takeover has occurred since the “Great Acceleration,” an acceleration in the growth of almost everything but driven by a spike in human population growth that began in the middle of the last century and still continues today because, despite a decrease in the rate of growth in many places, the size of the population base that it multiplies has now grown so large. Unfortunately, many people, including many academics, have committed themselves to the paradigm of endless growth, economic and demographic, and therefore tend to downplay the ecological consequences of this—all the more desperately in recent years, as some of these consequences are becoming more and more obvious. Now, if you take the position that human life and only human life is to be valued—I see Professor Nail seems to speak with favor of a “deeply anthropocentric” position—then perhaps you will be persuaded by what Derek Parfit has called “the Repugnant Conclusion,” and find nothing ethically objectionable about this vast erasure of nonhuman life and its replacement by us and the animals we like to eat, “maximizing” total utility until the bitter end. If you reject that position, as I do, then you are likely still trying to fathom how we humans could have perpetrated such an extensive program of “biological annihilation,” as another set of researchers (Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017) has termed it, and at the same time have given it so little epistemic recognition, let alone ethical acknowledgment, until recently. The issue before us, however, is the extent to which we are going to continue this onslaught, and it will be decided by our incoming generation of humans, not only with respect to how much energy they consume but by how many children they choose to have, how they will feed themselves, and everything in between.

    For those who believe that we can go on “growing,” in numbers and in energy and biomass consumption, indefinitely—and even that we SHOULD do so, as I fear Professor Nails may be promoting—I will point to a couple of considerations that should be taken into account even by dyed-in-the-wool anthropocentrists. One has to do with the structure of food webs within ecosystems, the basic pattern of energy flow through the system, from the “producers” at the base of the pyramid that actually trap the energy of the sun through photosynthesis, the green plants, up through herbivorous, omnivorous and carnivorous forms of animal life, up to the apex predators, which, in a naturally functioning ecosystem, make up the smallest amount of biomass, simply because of the physics of energy conversion with each upward step. We humans may think that we have managed to escape living in our appropriate ecological niche, piling ever more biomass up at the top of our global industrial food web, but we do it only by means of our massive agroindustrial system, which just happens to be heavily dependent upon fossil fuels for the synthesis of fertilizers and pesticides—the Haber-Bosch process of artificial nitrogen fixation has been called the “detonator of the population explosion” (Smil 1999), a dependency which it looks like we will be unable to eliminate (unless we somehow very carefully back down off that population growth curve) no matter how much “green energy” we embrace in other sectors. Meanwhile, there seems to be a growing consensus among biological scientists that insect numbers and biomass have been rapidly diminishing around the world, a growing concern since the insects make up “the vast middle” of many an ecological food web. But I will leave the details of food webs and “how we fit into that larger ecological structure,” the Biosphere, to the biological scientists for further explanation.

    To address our role in bringing on this mass extinction event, the sane thing to have done would have been to level off our population and our consumption (of all kinds of things, not just “energy”—altho you can homogenize it all with the reduction to “matter in motion,” but, like I asked once before, if that’s all we are too, where does ethical concern even arise?) at a sustainable level way back when we first got a glimpse of where we were headed—but that was around 50 years ago. Since we were apparently too wrapped up in our intraspecific concerns to actually exert the agency to do so when it was eminently feasible, it looks like we now are going to be stuck with the consequences of an overshoot of major proportions. Even anthropocentrists may eventually come to regret not recognizing the ethical claims of nonhuman life that could have served to put a brake on our planetary colonization in the effort to “maximize” humans-only utility, long before we came to such a pass. But, at the very least, if we open our eyes now to the ontology of current species relationships and their historical development, I think contemporary conversations about achieving justice for neglected groupings within our human species will need to be framed within a larger perspective that recognizes the shocking injustices to which members of these many severely impacted nonhuman species have been subjected. If we are seriously to exercise ethical agency in overturning domination and oppression, anthropocentrism is as much in need of critique as racism and all the other “isms” that identify our various forms of human-to-human inhumanity.

    • Thanks Ronnie for taking the time to read and engage with my work. Given your interpretation of it I appreciate your civility. As I mentioned to Jeremy, talking to strangers on the internet is difficult because it takes a bit to figure out where someone is coming from and how they are defining their terms. This is why I was trying to defer this discussion to Theory of the Earth where I start the story from the beginning, define my terms, and conclude with ethics. I know its a big ask to read a book. Everyone has pressures on their time. But new ideas often require a bit of explaining before you can make sense of the conclusions. And maybe you have all the ideas you need at the moment. The counter punch article was written a bit polemically, perhaps more than I would have liked because it seems people often misunderstand it. The essay was sort of meant to present a counter-intuitive idea that sounds wrong on first blush but then it sinks in that its energetically what is going on. Perhaps I should not have tried to say it in 1000 words like that. It definitely took me a months to get my head around the data and implications. My apologies if it was too subtle. But I stand by the accuracy of the data I use there.
      Well, in any case, Ronnie, it may surprise you that I think we agree on almost everything. If I have failed to be clear about my position, I apologize, but I am a little shocked that you interpreted me as saying literally the opposite of what I say. This is where its better to take a walk and talk 🙂
      1. You said I had a “lack of biological insight” you didn’t say about what. Again, I stand by the empirical data I cite in my article and I am open to being corrected if you or anyone else finds it be wrong. I am thinking that the “lack of insight” you mean is my “reductionism”. Well, to be technically accurate, everything in the universe is energy and momentum 🙂 . Everything is matter and motion but that does not mean it is all the same process (DNA does stuff rocks cant and rocks do things DNA cant, obviously) or that there are absolute deterministic laws of matter. Quantum indeterminacy and entanglement means, at least to me and other feminist new materialists, that matter is not billiard balls. Matter is creative and irreducible to any determinate stuff. This idea/interpretation requires some explaining, as a said, so I won’t say more here, since I have written much elsewhere. Therefore, I do not, as you say, “dismiss the complexity of life.” Sure, life is complex and so are galaxies, and both in different and unique ways. No one is saying life is not unique in certain ways.
      2. I also agree that “is” and “ought” are connected and that that is important. I said nothing to the contrary. I’m just not metaphysical or dogmatic about the connection (I’m not suggesting you are). I am just open to seeing what works and what doesn’t.
      3. I agree that life requires special ethical considerations, but so does everything else. I am not a biocentrist because I think that non-living planetary systems like rivers are also important (and not just because they support life). Perhaps we agree on this too that non-living nature also deserves ethical respect. I don’t know, but we both agree that all life-forms deserve ethics.
      4. You assumed that because I said that humans were only a small part of biomass that their impacts were unimportant or insignificant. I literally say the opposite, I say, “Some humans groups are responsible for destroying half the Earth’s forests, which make up 80% of total planetary biomass.” That is the whole point of the article. Some humans are a tiny faction but have massive over consumed too rapidly and destroyed a ton. Furthermore, its not just “humans” in general, its the white-captialist/colonial-patriarchy that is disproportionately responsible. I can’t go into all that here, but yea…Theory of the Earth.
      5. You said, I take “the position that human life and only human life is to be valued”. Again, I believe the opposite. That is the whole point of Theory of the Earth and my article. I agree with all you said (and more) against anthropocentrism. I am just trying to push our domain of ethical consideration further than life. Of course I think life deserves ethical consideration. But so do many other things as well, and each differently so.
      6. You said I believe that “we can go on “growing,” in numbers and in energy and biomass consumption, indefinitely—and even that we SHOULD do so, as I fear Professor Nails may be promoting—“. Let me rest your fears. That is again the opposite of the point of the article. Theory of the Earth has a much longer explanation of this point but I will try to say it shortly and clearly and less polemically. Certain powerful humans (at the expense of less powerful ones) have very rapidly dissipated energy on earth at the expense of destroying the planetary conditions of metabolic stability (which is dissipation). The Earth is a much bigger consumer of energy than humans but it matters HOW and how rapidly the energy is consumed. Certain humans have consumed by destroying trees and wild animals and oceans, as you say and as I say in the article and book. Theory of the Earth has a full summary of the most recent figures on all this. A healthy planet is one with tons of ecological diversity, like a rainforest. But my point is that ecological diversity dissipates a lot of energy. Humans are actually SLOWING down the earths natural dissipative systems (by destroying species diversity and ecosystems) and that is why we are screwed right now. Certain humans have consumed too much too fast and screwed up the dissipative process. The Gian metabolic system that normally dissipates way more energy is now relatively puttering along now thanks to certain humans, and capitalism. Esp. in just the last 30 years. Anyway, you know the rest of that story.
      Thanks again for taking the time to read and engage with my work respectfully. I have tried to do the same in my response. Even if we may not agree on everything, I think we agree on much.

      • Hi Thomas,

        Another way to get at one of the things Dr. Hawkins is after, I think, is to push on this comment by you: “I am just open to seeing what works and what doesn’t.” What do you mean by “what works”? (And for whom or for what, why?)

        On a different note, there is a version of biocentrism that holds that living beings deserve a specific kind of consideration, not to exclude other kinds of consideration for most anything else in the cosmos. On that position, biocentric reasons are simply considerations of living beings as such, not exhaustive of the various kinds of considerations other kinds of being may well deserve.

        Thanks for your link to your Lucretius II. I took a look at it this past Fall, but am still not convinced by your position on ethics. The issue for me is, on the one hand, related to Dr. Hawkins’s concern, only this time focused on the moral nexus which appears to be explained away in your ethics. The moral version of this worry is that your ethical formulations appear to be exclusively desirability characterizations, which I don’t think is true to human life’s interpersonal dimension. The most I took away from your ethics is that it can be helpful as an aid to undo narcissism in various degrees. But fully confronting narcissism still depends on differentiation and on the moral nexus to make sense. It would be most helpful if you wrote a book called Theory of Relationship, in which you discussed the “form of energy” that is interpersonal life.

        I’m looking forward to receiving Theory of the Earth, which I will read closely.

        Sincerely,

        Jeremy

        =

      • Dear Thomas (if I may)—

        To explain my reaction as I would if I were reviewing a paper submitted for publication, the reason why I accused your essay in Counterpunch of “a lack of biological insight” was twofold, or perhaps threefold: to begin with, I was surprised, given the topic, that it failed to make connections with what are generally accepted ways of speaking about a number of well-known biological processes—e.g., the structure of food webs, the basic pattern of energy flow through organisms and ecosystems systems, the source of the energy that drives these processes and so on—leaving your reader wondering if you in fact understood the workings of these processes (possibly you just wanted to assert some sort of disciplinary independence?).
        At any rate, perhaps a lack of familiarity with the basic biology led to problem #2, the extreme vagueness and imprecision of your wording, to the extent that it can be quite misleading to a reader who does not know better. I had a very frustrating experience trying to figure out what was meant when you used terms like “energy consumption,” and “energy use,” and “energy dispersal,” and “energy waste,” and for that matter “energy conservation” as if the kind of “energy” and the implied actions were essentially interchangeable, since these terms point to some very different things in different contexts. You needed to say WHAT KIND of “energy” was involved and being dealt with IN WHAT WAY. Perhaps you intentionally obscured these things in order to be provocative, but I’m afraid, if you mean what you say about our being in agreement about protecting and restoring the Biosphere, your words may have the opposite effect of what you would hope.

        When you say, early on in the essay, that “humans (some more than others) have come to consume vastly more energy than at any other point in history,” you are probably talking about the consumption of fossil fuels (although our total consumption of the embodied energy in biomass has also increased greatly as the human population has grown and needs increasing biomass to be fed), and you do say, presumably with respect to fossil fuels, that the “standard critique” of this kind of increasing energy consumption (presumably of its release of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and thereby warming the climate) “is not untrue.” But a little later on you say “the average tree consumes several times more energy, through the transpiration of hundreds of tons of water per year, than most people do by burning fossil fuels over the same period.” Now, the energy that that average tree “consumes” comes from the sun, not from fossil fuels; it’s given to us in real time, as a sustainable flux that builds and maintains the body of the tree, running complex processes like transpiration and many others, and it does not contribute to climate warming; fossil fuels are the remains of photosynthetically produced biomass that was created millions of years ago, and as we “consume” them, we do. All of this, of course, brings us to my third problem with the essay—following all the easy slides between different kinds of energy consumption, use, “waste,” etc to the final conclusion, “Even as our planet gets ever hotter, less stable, and less diverse, energy consumption is not the problem, it is the solution,” a casual reader, one who doesn’t understand the differences and may not even notice qualifications like “the standard critique [of fossil fuel consumption] is not untrue,” may come away with the impression that you are actually encouraging all kinds of energy consumption, including the human consumption of fossil fuels (and in fact, I’m still not entirely clear about this myself). Putting all that together, yes, that’s why on my first reading I came away kind of “shocked,” and not at all inclined to tackle a book-length treatment of the same material in the same confusing manner.
        To be a little more charitable with respect to your overall project, however, I see, near the end of the essay, this observation: “We tend to think of the world in terms of stasis and not process.” Yes, if we just think of everything around us as solid “things” and don’t see, conceptually, the constant movement of atoms and molecules—“matter”—going on within them all the time, then we should; no, we don’t live in a billiard-ball universe, and there’s much more to other living beings than as “products” for our use and suppliers of “ecosystem services” to make our food grow. It is important to open people’s eyes to the supremely complex material/energetic organization of the universe we inhabit, in particular to that part of it of most relevance to our lives, the Earth’s Biosphere; after all, that’s the REAL ontology of the “world” we live in. Why not go even farther, and when it comes to the living, try to convey what this rich tapestry of interacting lifeforms, each propelled by its inner solar-energy driven metabolic processes, looks like, to the best of our ability to “see” it (assuming you do not reject empiricism), as clearly and precisely as possible? There’s a wonderland of detail out there at your fingertips, and the science journals have some excellent graphics these days.

        Take transpiration, for example—it’s a complex biological process that maintains water balance for the plant and maintains leaf temperature in an optimal range for photosynthesis; solar energy drives the process, but the water flow is driven by potential gradients determined by ion concentrations and other considerations, there is apparently feedback between leaf temperature and the degree of stomatal opening, et cetera. And it’s only one among myriad other biological processes that all take part in keeping the tree alive—as well as, together with the other trees in the forest, hydrating the atmosphere and cooling the surrounding terrain. (The Amazon, for example, is said to pull around twenty billion tons of water up through its trees every day, bringing needed rain to southern South America and supplying up to 20% of freshwater input to the world’s oceans.) All of that “energy consumption” goes to power the life processes of those three trillion trees that you speak of, something that’s not at all the same as what’s being powered with human fossil fuel consumption: hurray, we can move around a lot faster than we once did and turn up our air conditioners when we get a little uncomfortable. Yes, by “reducing” them both to a single quantity, energy measured in calories or joules—see how our extravagant energy usage gets dwarfed in comparison to what the Earth’s remaining trees are “consuming”! See how easily different kinds of things can get all mashed together—homogenized—through conceptual reduction? I think, by engaging in this kind of fuzzy, reductionistic thinking, you are seriously misleading your reader. Why not just come out in favor of protecting and regenerating the planet’s forests, in plain language—would that not be “counterintuitive” enough?

        If science really isn’t you thing, however, maybe you could be sufficiently provocative by going for the ontology of something else, something that as yet has been subjected to very little philosophical scrutiny: money. I agree with you that “its the white-captialist/colonial-patriarchy that is disproportionately responsible” for destroying much of the expanse of the planet’s forests, increasingly so today as pipe dreams like BECCS make razing a few thousand acres of tropical forest land look alike “investment opportunities.” But how did things come to such a pass? What IS money, anyway, and how come it has such a hold on how we think and what we do? We can trace the development of the need for some medium of exchange way back into our own anthropology, but the growing fixation on the abstract symbol, and the obsession with “maximizing” it, is pretty recent, in my observation—an attitude that may be undergoing amplification by positive feedback. But truth be told, money really doesn’t “exist” at all, other than in our minds—in terms of energy flow, it’s just a particular kind of pattern of neuronal firing that happens to be collectively shared and socially reinforced. In the immediate, concrete, face-to-face situation, it’s useful; as every darn thing in the world becomes more and more “reduced” in our heads to numbers, units of financial abstraction, it’s extremely misleading in an ontological sense. In John Searle’s terminology, the existence of these entities—dollars, pounds, yuan, bitcoins, what have you—is ontologically subjective, unlike the real material things, living and nonliving, that they are displacing in our collective imaginary. If these entities really don’t exist, then why do they work so well, or at least continue to “make the world go round”? Why do they seem so real? Because, if we all “believe in” their existence, one person can’t just decide to stop “believing in” the coin of the realm and have it all—the whole economic superstructure—wink out of existence, because it continues to “exist” in other people’s minds, and they all give tacit agreement to it by continuing to conform to its institutional rules of behavior, as if their lives depended on it—which they do, in most cases. Global capitalism is really quite a piece of work, not only purely conceptually but in terms of social psychology, and it’s hard to know the best tack to take in trying to undo the knots in our thinking that serve to maintain the status quo. Certain conventions that currently figure in the many destructive “investment decisions” being launched today include wrinkles in our thought processes like “discounting the future,” and increasingly disconfirmed assumptions like the credo that coming generations will all be “wealthier” than the last might be good points of philosophical attack; surely no one can argue that these recent cultural habits of one species of linguistically enabled social primate are as much a given and immutable part of the universe, with as much claim to be preserved, as the patterns of matter and energy movement that have prevailed for the last several billion years before giving rise to us?

        That said, however, I think it is especially important today to try to convey an understanding of the structure of food webs within ecosystems, the basic pattern of energy flow through the system, from the green plants at the base of the pyramid trapping the energy of the sun up through several trophic levels to the apex predators, which, in a naturally functioning ecosystem, embody the smallest amount of biomass. This basic pattern is something I think you had in mind when you said “every time something eats something else in the food chain, it only uses about 1/10 of its available energy to survive. The rest is burned off as heat and waste.” I would rephrase that a bit: the animal that eats “something else” from the trophic level below it—some plant matter if it’s a herbivore, another animal if it’s a carnivore—only has available to it, according to the standard estimate, only about 1/10 of the energy that is embodied in the organism that it eats—plant or animal—because that organism has to use most of energy that it takes in—solar energy if a plant, biomass energy if animal itself—to run its own metabolism, so yes, this energy is “burned off” in its “respiration.” Thus you get the “stepping down” of the amount of biomass that can exist with each “step up” of trophic level, “why big, fierce animals are rare,” and why many more people can be fed from a piece of land if they are vegetarians than if they choose to eat meat. Moreover, we should not think of the energy in what is not passed directly “up” the food chain to the next trophic level as “waste”—much of this remaining biomass will be utilized by detritivores, important soil organisms that are necessary to keep the whole, marvelous “eternal return” of matter in the form of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and so on, coupled with the the endless flow of solar energy, captured in organic compounds in constant flux, passing through an ever-diminishing mass of organic forms until it dissipates into heat. Since the solar flow is expected to continue for much longer into the future than our current slate of species is likely to, nothing is being “wasted’ in this process, as long as we don’t interfere with it.

        Understanding how food webs work is crucially important, I think, for understanding the precarity of our situation today. You’re right that “some human groups” are responsible for an inordinate amount of destruction because they are able to play an abstract symbol-game that has all the rest of us ensnared in its socially constructed rules. But there’s also a great deal of destruction that results, and will continue to result in the future, simply from the demands of keeping our human mass alive and fed on into the future, especially if we continue to increase our numbers as predictions hold. We have achieved something that would not have been possible before the discovery of fossil fuels, transforming some of that energy into a way of feeding many more people than could have been fed within the natural capacity of the planets’ food webs utilizing real-time solar energy, and now we’re even trying to pile more and more of them up at the tops of food webs by selling them on the prestige value of eating meat. Continuing our growth on both of these fronts because our more-is-always-better culture has built these expectations into what is now a globally expecting-to-consume society has “ecocide” written all over it. For this reason, I hope you will give serious thought to the meaning of “maximizing human and ecological diversity,” and clarify what you have in mind by concluding that “Even as our planet gets ever hotter, less stable, and less diverse, energy consumption is not the problem, it is the solution.” Diversity of human individuals, as well as diversity of cultural practices of human subgroupings, can be fostered without increasing the absolute number of people on the Earth or in any particular subgroup, or the amount of fossil-fuel-produced, energy-containing biomass that they “consume,” whereas the maximizing of ecological diversity would require reversing these trends. So please, I caution you, try to be more precise in your language.

        And I thank you for responding to my comments with civility of your own; may we both benefit from the exchange! —Ronnie

  6. Thanks again, Jeremy for your follow ups and for your interest in my work. You are right, it is a bigger story. But I think the bigger story lets us start from a different place and get to different conclusions. Sometimes if we start form the same place we never get out of the problems that place sets for us. I also wrote a book on Ethics (https://www.amazon.com/Lucretius-II-Ethics-Thomas-Nail/dp/1474466648/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Lucretius+II&qid=1611597487&sr=8-1) if that might help answer some of your questions I can’t get into here like this. Hopefully, we will be able to walk and talk one day about these questions more. Cheers.

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