Copyright © 2012 by Environmental Philosophy.Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Environmental Philosophy 9 (2), 95–121.

Ecologizing Sartre’s Ontology: Nature, Science, and Dialectics

Matthew C. AllyCity University of New York/BMCC, Department of Social Science, 199 Chambers

Street, New York, NY 10007; mally@bmcc.cuny.edu

I argue that Sartre’s philosophy can be both broadened in its aspirations and deepened in its implications through dialogue with the life sciences. Section 1 introduces the philosophical terrain. Section 2 explores Sartre’s evolving understanding of nature and human relations with nature. Section 3 explores Sartre’s perspectives on scienti!c inquiry, natural history, and dialectical reason. Section 4 outlines recent developments in the life sciences that bear directly on Sartre’s quiet curiosity about a naturalistic dialectics. Section 5 suggests how these developments constitute progress toward an “ecologized” dialectical philosophy consistent with Sartre’s mature ontology of praxis and pertinent to addressing the burgeoning socioecological crisis.

1. Introduction: “More !an a Pious Dream…”?

Scienti!c conversations have two advantages over other conversations. Both come from two rules of how to pose questions to nature: !rst, scienti!c questions must encourage nature to answer ‘no’; second, it must be possible to ask nature the same question over and over again.

—Andreas Wagner, Paradoxical Life

It seems fair to suggest that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) would be interested today in the question of the human place in nature, and particularly in the character and implications of contemporary human relations with planet Earth. Notwithstanding Sartre’s staunch and lifelong humanism and preference for the human-wrought accoutrements of civilization, the social and ecological dimensions of our earthly relations are now utterly and irrevocably entangled and mutually constitutive at a planetary scale, and so the cosmopolitan social crisis that so concerned Sartre has devolved into a properly global socioecological crisis. !is unprecedented state of a"airs would surely have

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 captured Sartre’s philosophical imagination, sooner or later. Or so I like to think.1

In this essay I argue that Sartre’s manner of thinking things through can be both broadened in its aspirations and deepened in its implications through dialogue with recent developments in the life sciences. !is is a strong and (perhaps) counterintuitive claim, and it presupposes an answer to a question Sartre always left open: #at is the proper relation between science and philosophy? Posed from Sartre’s mature philosophical perspective, at least two questions are nested in this Janus-faced one. First, is there a natural history, in the mature Sartre’s plenary sense of History? Second, is Nature dialectical, in the mature Sartre’s plenary sense of Dialectics?2 In what follows, I answer the $rst of these questions with a cautious yes, and the second with a precautionary perhaps. !ese answers have a direct bearing on the pertinence of Sartre’s manner of thinking things through to the tasks of environmental philosophy and ethics.

!e argument unfolds as follows. Section 2 critically reviews Sartre’s evolving understanding of Nature and human relations with Nature. Section 3 does the same for Sartre’s interrelated and shifting views on scienti$c inquiry, natural history, and dialectical reason. Section 4 o"ers a sketch of recent developments in the life sciences that bear directly on Sartre’s reticence and curiosity before the questions of natural history and a naturalistic dialectics. And Section 5 suggests how these new developments constitute fundamental progress along the path toward an “ecologized” dialectical philosophy that is compellingly consistent with Sartre’s mature ontology of praxis, and informatively pertinent to our understanding of the burgeoning socioecological crisis we face.3

1.  !is essay is drawn largely from Chapter 3 of my A Case Study in Existential Ecology: Bringing Sartre to the Biosphere (forthcoming, Lexington Books). Portions of the essay have been presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the North American Sartre Society, and the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists. I would like to thank Joe Catalano, Ken Estey, Bill McBride, and Bob Stone for their comments on earlier drafts; and also the sta" of the research library of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where the bulk of research and $nal drafting of this essay was completed.2.  For the remainder of this essay I selectively employ Sartre’s practice of capitalizing the abstract nominative, Nature. !is is not meant to indicate my own philosophical endorsement of the practice but to keep the analysis consistent with Sartre’s nomenclature and to highlight moments where Sartre’s sense of nature is speci$cally at issue. I should note that Sartre was often inconsistent in his use of his own terminological conventions, and it is di%cult to know just when the inconsistency was intentional and when not.3.  See also my “Intimations of a New Socioecological Imaginary,” forthcoming.

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2.1 Sartre, Nature, and Humankind

All of a sudden, however, we posit as the object of our interrogation not the mind, not the body, not the psychic, not the social or the cultural, but the human condition in its indivisible unity. Idealism’s error is to posit the mind !rst. %e error of materialism and all kinds of naturalism is to make man into a natural being.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, %e War Diaries

Before the negation of the negation comes the negation. Sartre’s philosophy of nature was, at best, impoverished. !ough he never re&ected systematically or extensively on the character and signi$cance of nature, it is easy enough to $gure out what and how he thought about it. And it is no secret that he did not much care for it. He was the quintessential mid-twentieth century cosmopolitan urbanite. He preferred cities and civilization to the countryside, and had little interest in natural environments, and even less in wilderness. Simone de Beauvoir captures Sartre’s sensibility well: “He abhors—the word isn’t too strong—the seething life of insects and the profusion of plants . . . he feels at home only in towns, at the heart of an arti$cial universe consisting of manmade objects. He likes neither raw vegetables nor milk which has come straight from the cow” (Hayman, 1987, 110; also cited in Ferrell 2003, 165, n. 14). !is personal sensitivity, one verging on repugnance, is explicitly re&ected and systematically in&ected throughout Sartre’s philosophical oeuvre, albeit changing in subtle but nontrivial ways along the path from his early phenomenological ontology to his mature dialectical anthropology.

2.2 Passivity, Exteriority, InertiaIn Sartre’s early ontology, Nature is (almost) entirely subsumed under the rubric of brute Being. “Nature” is little more than an extra name for the inert and opaque passivity of the in-itself, as opposed to the active translucency of the for-itself. !e for-itself is characterized by “absolute interiority” (e.g., 305), to which Sartre consistently contrasts “the principle of inertia which constitutes all nature as exteriority” (1956, 313, emphasis added). Indeed, Nature is “pure exteriority,” as he puts it in the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics (NE, 14, emphasis added). !ere he speaks also of “the hidden irrationality of nature”; he indicts “the equilibrium of nature and death”; and situates Nature—in relation to (modern) humankind—as “at base, passivity” (13, 60, 350). No nature lover, indeed.

2.3 History, Culture, MaterialityWe catch a subtler glimpse of the tension between Nature and humankind in an essay from the late 1940s, as Sartre makes his way

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further along the path toward his mature dialectical perspective. In “Materialism and Revolution,” Sartre explicitly rejects Engels’ construal of the dialectics of Nature, not for the $rst time, nor for the last (see, e.g., Notebooks for an Ethics, 62", 450; and references in Section 3 below). He adds unequivocally that “it is obvious that the notion of natural history is absurd . . . only human history is possible” (1955, 192). He describes the Darwinian understanding of evolution as “of a mechanical and not dialectical order” (192–3). He again endorses the rigid divide between nature’s exteriority and human interiority—a divide which in this instance he attributes explicitly to Hegel (196). He speaks of the laborer as “the link between man and Nature,” the mediator who expresses “the original relation of man to the world, which is precisely the coordinated action of one upon the other” (212, emphases added). Despite Sartre’s increasingly dialectical sensibilities, these many prepositions—between, of, to, upon—carry the burden of an all too familiar supposition: that humankind and nature are somehow radically distinct from each other, even if they are, as Sartre always acknowledged, cut from the same cloth and forever bound together.

Still later, in Search for a Method and well along the path to Critique of Dialectical Reason, little has changed in regard to Nature. !ere Sartre again (albeit more softly) opposes nature to freedom: “#at we call freedom is the irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order” (1963, 152). And again, little will have changed by the time Sartre poses the question that will dominate the Critique: “Do we have today the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?” (1963, xxxiv). !is latter question lies at the heart of Sartre’s idiosyncratic in&ection of dialectics, materialism, and humanism:

!e monism which starts from the human world and situates man in Nature is the monism of materiality. !is is the only monism which is realist. . . . It is the only monism which makes man neither a molecular dispersal nor a being apart, the only one which starts by de$ning him by his praxis in the general milieu of animal life, and which can transcend the following two true but contradictory propositions: all existence in the universe is material; everything in the world of man is human. (1991, 180–1)

And this ambiguity of the material world provides more than a hint of Sartre’s ambivalence toward the materiality of humanity.

Another decade later, toward the end of %e Words (admittedly, not part of Sartre’s systematic philosophical project, but revealing nonetheless), Sartre echoes the same sentiment in a di"erent way: “Culture doesn’t save anything or anyone, it doesn’t justify. But it is a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone o"ers him his image” (1964, 254, emphasis

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added). I emphasize the word, alone. We see ourselves, according to Sartre, only in the mirror of culture, not in Nature. And in any case, if there is a mirror of Nature (pace Rorty), it is not one worth peering into, for it does not re&ect us, or at least it does not re&ect what matters most about us. (!is quasi-vampiric erasure is not without a certain irony, of course, given the mounting socioecological crisis and the very real threats it poses to the human species.) If, by situating humankind relationally within Nature, Sartre manages to escape both trivializing reductionisms and trivial dualisms—the original and originary di%culties of all conventional materialisms respectively (cf. BN, 176)—he remains perpetually and solely concerned with the intelligibility and irreducibility of human praxis and humankind. For nothing else, on Sartre’s account, makes History, and so nothing else is Dialectical. So far so much: Nature is neither historical nor dialectical in Sartre’s plenary sense of these terms.

2.4 Immersion, Separation, Isolation!e question remains: #at is the precise character of the distinction between humankind and all the rest of (earthly) Nature? And what is the signi$cance of this separation? On these matters Sartre is always subtle in his own way. Near the end of “Materialism and Revolution,” he writes evocatively and unequivocally,

It is not true, then, that man is outside Nature and the world, as the idealist has it, or that he is only up to his ankles in it, baulking like a bather having a dip while her head is in the clouds. He is completely in Nature’s clutches, and at any moment Nature can crush him and annihilate him, body and soul. (236, emphasis in original)

Our relationship with the rest of Nature, on this account, is essentially adversarial; and our adversary, it seems, may have the upper hand. For Sartre, most importantly, negotiating the relation depends not on Nature, but upon the quintessentially human phenomenon of historical praxis. It is the task of human History—again, the only sort of history there is in Sartre’s estimation—to shake free of Nature’s aggressive grip, to release us from the given, to escape the captivity of the human order in the natural order, so that we may take the liberty of what Sartre will much later call “integral humanity.”4 And so it comes as no surprise—even if it comes as a disappointment—that as late as 1965, in “Morale et histoire,” Sartre rea%rms the twofold adversarial relation: “!e meaning of praxis is the subjection of the world to man without reciprocity” (2005). Again and again, Sartre reminds us that we are apart from Nature, and alone.

4.  A term of art in the still-unpublished 1964 Rome Lectures (see !omas Anderson 1993).

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#ile there is a danger of caricature in this reading of Sartre’s philosophy of Nature—placing the brute passivity of the natural in wholesale opposition to the engaged and active human, and so suggesting any number of dualisms that Sartre repeatedly and emphatically rejected—the philosophical tensions are as palpable as Sartre’s personal preferences for things human. Sartre frames his ideas about Nature and humankind in a way that enables the caricaturist, whose exaggerated lines, after all, do capture something of Sartre’s attitude toward bugs and raw vegetables and warm milk from a cow’s &eshy udder, to say nothing of his attitude toward the idea of natural history and the prospects for a dialectics of Nature. #en all is said and done (that is, by the time of Sartre’s death), non-humankind and humankind remain fundamentally distinct. And if it turns out that both orders are intelligible together, what then? !is remains to be seen.

2.5 Magic, Desire, AmbivalencePerhaps even Sartre had some secret, almost forgotten sense of natural clarity, if not of Nature’s charity. As he writes midway through the Notebooks:

From the fact of the priority of the world, from the fact of the reciprocal and magical action of desire on desire, man is everywhere crisscrossed by Nature. He himself is a natural being, to the extent that Nature is magic. If he is an actualization of the natural object through desire, reciprocally we can say that Nature desires itself in and through him. He is the catalyst and unveiler of Nature. He is so that Nature reaches its maximum of fecundity. (1992, 352)

And so many years later, in %e Words, he says more: “truth &ows from the mouths of babes and sucklings. Still close to Nature, they are cousins of the wind and the sea: their stammerings o"er broad and vague teachings to him who can hear them” (Sartre 1964, 28–29). Of course, magic is hardly a good thing for Sartre. Indeed, it is perhaps the surest index of all mysti$cation. And this is to say nothing of the hole that is desire or the stammerings of those for whom language remains a receding horizon of intelligibility. Still, if Sartre was no nature lover, whatever else may be said, his personal ambivalence toward things natural was crisscrossed by a deep and lifelong awareness that Nature matters, and perhaps in ways we have barely begun to fathom.

3.1 Sartre, Science, and Dialectics

%e point of view of pure knowledge is contradictory; there is only the point of view of engaged knowledge. %is amounts to saying that knowledge and action are only two abstract aspects of an original, concrete relation. . . . A pure knowledge in fact would be

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a knowledge without a point of view; therefore a knowledge of the world but on principle located outside the world. But this makes no sense.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Sartre always held science at arm’s length, at once openly acknowledging its remarkable explanatory power and subtly demeaning its “abstract point of view” (1956, 307) and its “positivistic” and “analytical” character (1991a, e.g., 32"). If, for Sartre the phenomenologist, humanity is as humanity does, so, for Sartre the dialectician, science is as science does. Ever-fascinated with “objective relations” and wholly sunken in “the world of objects” (1956, 311), science “aims at establishing relations of simple exteriority” (1956, 197; 1991a, 32"). !e scientist is “a de-situated investigator” (1991b, 2, note), and so remains by default forever trapped on the nearside of dialectical comprehension. !e work of science is, in e"ect, a double abstraction—a double-blind e"ort to explain external relations from the outside. At worst, this “makes no sense”; at best, it is a matter of ancillary philosophical concern, at least as far as Sartre is concerned.

Both phenomenologically and dialectically science is wholly dependent upon “an ontological relation which must render all experience possible” (BN, 176), to wit, the internal relation between lived experience and its world, between praxis and history, and this is exactly the relation scientism evades. !e early Sartre put the point unequivocally: “!e world resists ethics just as Nature resists science. One should speak of a hidden immorality of the world just as one speaks of a hidden irrationality of nature” (Sartre 1992, 13, emphasis added). Despite the explanatory prowess and technological fruits of the scienti$c manner of knowing the world, like being-in-itself, Nature still and always resists us with its fundamental irrationality, and by implication, it rebukes us with its own sort of immorality; and scientism is our own rebuke of ourselves. History proper is the sole domain of rationality and morality, for only history is dialectical, so far.

3.2 Scienti"c EvolutionBoth Nature’s rebuke and its resistance must come from somewhere. It always bears repeating that that which is given must be taken in some way. Perhaps there is a better way to take the given. And the prospect of a better science seems always to have lurked in the back of Sartre’s porous mind. Early in the Critique, he acknowledges some small progress in this regard, and hints at the prospect of more:

[Newtonian] science does not have to account for the facts that it discovers; it establishes their existence and their relation with other facts. Later, the movement of scienti$c thought itself will lift this mortgage. . . . Without ceasing to be a fact, it is no longer the untranscendable !nal fact;

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it is part of a new conception of the universe and we know now that every contingent fact, however untranscendable it may appear, will be transcended in its turn, by other facts. (1976, 31–32)

!is inherent openness and integrativity of science is dialectically promising—and comes as some relief in light of the nontranscendable climate of impossibility for ethics about which Sartre worried during the same period (Sartre 1963a, 186, note). But what exactly does it promise? Not many pages later, Sartre evokes the prospect of “the existence of dialectical connections in inanimate Nature,” but quickly asserts that “in the present state of our knowledge . . . we are [not] in a position to a%rm or deny it” (1976, 32–33). !ere is, as of yet, no place for science in the dialectical conversation, let alone for a dialectical science. As it is for dialectics in Nature, so it is for a Dialectics of Nature: “[!e] claim must be extra-scienti$c. . . for if there is such a thing as a dialectical reason, it is revealed and established in and through human praxis” (1976, 33, emphasis added), not in and through natural objects and the exterior relations among them. We may have avoided foreclosure, but the mortgage remains. And Sartre waits.

3.3 An Aberrant ScienceIf Sartre recognizes a certain “soft” dialecticity in scienti$c progress and process, a full-blown dialectics of Nature as such “cannot be anything more than the object of a metaphysical hypothesis.” On this point, at least, Sartre follows Lukacs’ in&uential rejection of the Dialectic of Nature in History and Class Consciousness, and he is just as unequivocal:

!e procedure of discovering dialectical rationality in praxis, and then projecting it, as an unconditional law, onto the inorganic world, and then returning to the study of societies and claiming that this opaquely irrational law of nature conditions them, seems to us to be a complete aberration. A human relation, which can be recognized only because we ourselves are human, is encountered, hypostasized, stripped of every human characteristic and, $nally, this irrational fabrication is substituted for the genuine relation which was encountered in the $rst place. !us in the name of monism the practical rationality of man making History is replaced by the ancient notion of blind Necessity, the clear by the obscure, the evident by the conjectural, Truth by Science Fiction. (1976, 33)

Typically strong words, though it must also be noted that Sartre’s in&ection of the Lukacian rejection is just as typically open-ended. Sartre rules nothing out on principle. “#at is necessary is simply to reject apriorism”; “the point is to subordinate nothing a priori” (1963, 42 and 75). He only asserts, and fairly enough, that “at present, the

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absolute principle that ‘Nature is dialectical’ is not open to veri!cation at all” (1976, 28, emphasis added). “We shall accept the idea that man is a material being among material beings and, as such does not have a privileged statute; we shall even refuse to reject a priori the possibility that a concrete dialectics of Nature will one day be discovered” (1976, 34). #at he rejects he rejects on practical grounds—or better, on “praxional” grounds. And he waits.

For Sartre, one thing is clear: the hypothesis of a dialectics of Nature cannot mean what Engels hoped it to mean. But it could mean something else. In fairness to Engels, Sartre tends to downplay the remarkable ambition and undeniable, albeit scattered, merits of Engels’ e"ort. As J. B. S. Haldane puts it, Engels’ Dialectics of Nature seeks to be “not merely a philosophy of history, but a philosophy which illuminates all events whatever, from the falling of a stone to a poet’s imaginings” (1940, xv). !at is to say, it aims at what Sartre likes to call comprehension. Still, Sartre is right enough to assert that Engels’ dream of subsuming to a cosmological history wrought by natural forces the intrinsic dialecticity of a human history wrought by human hands cannot be ful$lled, at least not if the goal is to do so in a manner consistent with Engels’ dialectical in&ection of nineteenth century analytical and positivist science. As Sartre worries, and not without reason, “the universe becomes a dream if the dialectic controls man from outside” (1991a, 35). But, again, science is as science does, not merely as it has done. “!e possibility that a dialectic exists is itself dialectical” (35), and the sweep of dialectical possibility cannot be limited on principle, but only in practice. Engels knew this as surely as anyone ever has. Sartre simply calls him to task in the light of the limits of analytical and positivist science as it had so far been practiced. And still, he waits.

3.4 !ings to ComeIn a long and prescient footnote in the Critique Sartre puts his cards on the table. He suggests that if science makes a certain sort of progress, then a dialectical philosophy of Nature becomes “more than a pious dream”; that if certain requirements can be ful$lled by science, then the idea of a dialectics of Nature “becomes more interesting.” #ile the note bears the marks of hasty construction (a complaint that can fairly be made against many pages of the Critique!), it also accurately identi$es a set of core questions that must be addressed if there is to be any viable dialectical account of natural phenomena, to say nothing of a full-blown Dialectics of Nature. I quote the note in full:

It may be said that the metaphysical hypothesis of a dialectic of Nature becomes more interesting when it is used to explain the passage from inorganic matter to organic bodies, and the evolution of life on Earth.

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!is is true. But it should be noted that this formal interpretation of life and evolution will never be more than a pious dream as long as scientists have no way of using ‘totality’ and ‘totalization’ as a guiding hypothesis. Nothing is gained by proclaiming that the evolution of the species or the appearance of life are moments of the “dialectic of Nature” as long as we are ignorant of how life appeared and how species are transformed. For the present, biology, in its actual research, remains positivistic and analytical. It is possible that a deeper knowledge of its object, through its contradictions, will force biology to consider the organism in its totality, that is to say, dialectically, and to consider all biological facts in their relation of interiority. !is is possible, but not certain. In any event, it is curious that Marxists, as dialecticians of nature, denounce as idealists those who, like Goldstein, attempt (rightly or wrongly) to consider organic beings as totalities, although this only involves showing (or trying to show) the dialectical irreducibility of the “state of matter” which is life, to another state—inorganic matter—which nevertheless generated it. (1991a, 34, n. 16)

If there is a dialectics of Nature that is more than a “dogmatic metaphysics,” as Sartre characterizes the prospect in Search for a Method (1963b, 181), it must not merely be hypothesized and mapped onto existing science, it must be dialectically demonstrated by new science. And any such demonstration would require, minimally, the dialectical satisfaction of at least $ve criteria. Short of this, a dialectics of Nature, and by extension the tamer idea of Natural History, are meaningless. To demonstrate the meaningfulness of, minimally, a truly Natural History or, maximally, a proper dialectics of Nature, let alone the irreducibility of either to the other, would require the ful$llment of four broadly empirical criteria. (I extrapolate these $ve criteria from the note, and have modi$ed the order in which Sartre presents them.) Science must (1) explain the origin of life, (2) consider the organism in its totality, (3) explain the evolution of species, and (4) consider all biological facts in their relation of interiority. !ese four empirical criteria can be gathered, for heuristic purposes, under an overarching criterion that is broadly theoretical: (5) science must demonstrate the dialectical irreducibility of life to inorganic matter. I will return to this in due course.

Before proceeding further, it should be noted that there are other criteria nested within the note, and even criteria nested within criteria. For example, Sartre suggests that science must explicitly engage the notions of “totality” and “totalization,” and by implication, that it would bene$t from the use of other key notions in a (Sartrean) dialectical lexicon, such as praxis, praxis-process, practico-inertia, the distinction between concepts and notions, and so on. Such a refashioning of the scienti$c discourse is implausible, at best. But the overall requirement is not discursive but methodological, as evidenced in Sartre’s persistent concern with science’s captivity only to positivism and analytical reason,

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which in turn can be overcome to the extent that science manages to consider biological facts in and through investigation of their contradictions. A Dialectics of Nature worth its name would include all natural phenomena within its purview, that is, it would fold humankind and the rest of the community of life and all of nonliving matter, too, into “the real movement of a unity in the process of being made” (Sartre 1963b, 69). To demonstrate the irreducibility of life to dead matter is thus the natural scienti$c extension of Sartre’s (and others’) e"ort to demonstrate the dialectical irreducibility of (human) experience to dead matter. In short, if Sartre’s requirements can be ful$lled scienti!cally, a Dialectics of Nature becomes “more interesting.” Sartre recognizes that these things are possible, but they are not certain. So he waits.

Perhaps Sartre was right in 1959 to insist that “the only dialectic one will $nd in Nature is a dialectic that one has put there oneself” (1991a, 31). But things have changed. !e burden of proof has shifted. Much has happened in the natural sciences since Sartre’s time, and in the life sciences in particular. It is to these developments that we now turn.

4.1 New Answers to Old Questions

We are accustomed to thinking of life as a characteristic of individual organisms. Individuals are alive, but an individual cannot sustain life. Life is sustained only by a group of organisms of many species—not simply a horde or a mob, but a certain kind of system composed of many individuals of di-erent species—and their environment, making together a network of living and nonliving parts that can maintain the .ow of energy and the cycling of chemical elements that, in turn, support life.

—Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies

To repeat, the central concerns of this essay are the place of dialectical reason in science, the place of science in a dialectical philosophy, and the possibility of a properly natural History. Lurking in the background of the inquiry is the more plenary notion of a dialectics of Nature dreamt by Engels, rejected by Lukacs, and, even as he rejected it too, quietly imagined by Sartre. !e task in this section is to reconsider each of these questions in light of new scienti$c developments, and refracted through the lens of Sartre’s $vefold criteriology (as elaborated in Section 3.4). Before we proceed, a few caveats are in order.

First, this section provides highly condensed sketches of recent developments in only some of the relevant sciences, some of which may be familiar ground to some readers. Familiar territory or not, what matters at least as much as understanding these developments is to understand them together. I can only o"er a taste of them here, and I only hint at the relevance of them to Sartre’s demands in this section, and in somewhat more detail in the next.

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Second, and more important, in keeping with Sartre’s overarching concern with the irreducibility of life to dead matter, each step in this discussion of the new sciences of life and complexity will work its way upward “from the bottom,” moving in stages from the level of the molecule to the cell to the organism to the living and nonliving subsystems that support higher-order ecosystems, and ending $nally with the planetary scale and a “top down” view of the whole Earth system. !is trajectory is in no way meant to (re)a%rm the conventional reductionist account, predicated as it is upon two things Sartre emphatically rejected: a commitment to atomistic entities as fundamental explananda and to upward physical causation as the driver of all change. As this section brie&y demonstrates, many scientists today gladly acknowledge that the standard “bottom up” account has lost its grip on good science. Admittedly, certain of the scientists I discuss still rely on and even profess reductionist and mechanistic assumptions that seem to &y in the face of a properly dialectical imagination. Su%ce it to say that many good scientists are not such good philosophers. Hence a $nal caveat.

!ose same scientists might fairly retort that most philosophers are not scientists at all, good or bad. In any case, despite all the research in the scienti$c literature upon which this overview is based, I am not a scientist, and the scienti$c developments here reviewed warrant a far more rigorous scienti!c assessment than I am quali$ed to provide. So be it. I admit forthrightly the limited aspirations and force of the assessments o"ered, which I nonetheless believe are valid.

Les jeux sont faits.5 So, what sorts of things are life scientists saying that Sartre might want to hear?

4.2 Origins and Totality: Molecules, Autonomy, Organisms#at of the origin of life and the organism in its totality, Sartre’s $rst and second criteria? It should come as no surprise that many scientists look to the molecular level to seek insight into the origins of physical order. More importantly, and perhaps more surprising, some of them are looking to the molecular level for the original expression of autonomy which, in their view, provides the key to the origins of properly biological order and living systems as such. “#at must a physical system be,” Stuart Kau"man asks, “such that it can act on its own behalf?” (2000, x). He answers “that, as the molecular diversity of a reaction system increases, a critical threshold is reached at which collectively autocatalytic, self-reproducing chemical reaction networks emerge spontaneously” (2000, 16). From these physical networks emerge living systems. How far “down” we must go to $nd

5.  Literally, “the plays are made,” title of a wartime screenplay written by Sartre in 1943, produced as a $lm in 1947, and translated into English as %e Chips Are Down in 1952.

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the shift from physics to biology, and where agency begins, remains to be seen, but Kau"man argues that “autocatalytic [molecular] polymer systems are examples of a primitive kind of agency, the locus of survival and death, the locus of integrated response to the environment,” and the penultimate step along the path to the emergence of life here on Earth. For Kaufmann the etiological relation is (perhaps) counterintuitive: agency precedes life. Surprise!

Kaufmann takes the bacterium as the paramount example of autonomy and life, and draws us into the fray as well:

An autonomous agent is a physical system, such as a bacterium, that can act on its own behalf in an environment. All free-living cells and organisms are clearly autonomous agents. !e quite familiar, utterly astonishing feature of autonomous agents—E. coli, paramecia, yeast cells, algae, sponges, &at worms, annelids, all of us—is that we do, everyday, manipulate the universe around us. (2000, 8)

!e notion of molecular autonomy highlights the autonomous, open-ended, and integrative character of certain sorts of molecular assemblages. !ough perhaps incipient prior to life if Kaufmann is right, autonomy is most evident in living systems, and even in the simplest among them. But just what distinguishes life from nonlife, anyway?

As Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela put the question, “#at is common to all living systems that allows us to qualify them as living?” (Varela 1979, 4). In the lexicon of Maturana and Varela, well enough known though not widely enough adopted, the original life-form, and all subsequent life forms, are autopoietic. !e etymology of the term is transparent: Gk. auto–self + poiesis–making, production, creation. !us autopoiesis denotes self-making or self-creation or “self-poetizing” (Dicks 2011)—a “poetics of sel$ng,” perhaps. However it might be translated, the notion is exemplary in its logical simplicity and its descriptive parsimony. Pier Luigi Luisi identi$es three interrelated but distinct characteristics of an autopoietic system (2006, 159):

1. !e autopoietic system must have a semi-permeable boundary.2. !e boundary must be produced and maintained from within the

system.3. !e system itself must contain the reactions that regenerate the system.

!e signi$cance of these characteristics is also transparent enough:1. Because the boundary is a boundary, it determines the identity

of the cell within its medium and across the time of its life. Moreover, because the boundary is semi-permeable, it mediates the organism’s

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relation with its environment, permitting certain substances to pass through it, while others are prevented from doing so.

2. !e bounded nature of an autopoietic system entails the complex biochemistry of membrane production and maintenance. !is production and maintenance are fundamental to the system’s persistence. A cell that fails to produce and maintain its own boundary will not long endure.

3. Not only boundary production and maintenance, but all production and maintenance processes must be internal to the autopoietic system, such that the system produces the right sorts of reactions both within the cell and near its surface to guarantee that the various transfers, in&uxes, and out&ows involve the right sorts of materials and energy moving in the right directions to the right places at the right times.

#atever may be said of collective autocatalytic sets of molecules, this is precisely what living cells do, every one of them, all the time. If the energetic openness of the autopoietic system reveals its fundamental dependence on an external environment, its operational closure is the clearest index of its fundamental autonomy within that environment. In this sense, an autopoietic entity is a totality—or in Varela’s preferred term, a “unity”—and the structural-organizational logic of autopoiesis is dialectical. Interestingly, and not incidentally, I think, Varela quotes Sartre’s footnote in its entirety as an epigraph to his Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979).

4.3 Transformation: Complexity, Self-Organization, and Evolution#at of the evolution of life and the transformation of species, Sartre’s third criterion? Robert Reid, a theoretical biologist, phrases the concern thus: “#at we really need to discover is how novelties are generated, how they integrate with what already exists, and how new, more complex whole organisms can be greater than the sum of their parts” (2007, 9). !e conventional answer to this question is well-known: Darwinian natural selection is said to be both the necessary and su%cient condition for the emergence of order and variety in living systems. In this regard, complexity-oriented biologists like Kau"mann and Reid argue that Darwin only got it half-right. Natural selection is necessary, most assuredly, but it is not su%cient. Enter complexity science and self-organizing processes.

Of complexity, only two things need to be said here. First, complex does not (necessarily) mean complicated. “Systems are complex not because they involve many . . . rules and large numbers of components but because of the nature of the system’s global response. Complexity and complex systems . . . generally refer to a system of interacting units that displays global properties not present at the lower level” (Camazine et al.

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2001, 11, emphasis added). Second, in each such complex system, self-organizing processes come into play: “Self-organization [occurs in any] process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely [or in part] from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system” (ibid., 8, emphasis added, my glosses). In nonliving systems, like water spinning down a drain or an autumn leaf tornado making its way down the sidewalk, pattern is just “a particular, organized arrangement of objects in space and time”; in living systems, like ant colonies and schooling $sh and tra%c jams, pattern always emerges “through interactions internal to the [living] system, without intervention by external directing in&uences,” and involves information exchange (ibid., 7–8, emphasis added).

As Kau"mann reminds us, every “snow&ake’s delicate sixfold symmetry tells us that order can arise without the bene$t of natural selection” (2000, 1). Kau"man, Reid, and others argue that this same sort of spontaneous order so familiar in the nonliving realm crosses, neither magically nor inexplicably, into the realm of the living. Indeed, life would never have emerged nor have gotten anywhere new without it. Only an interactive relation between complexity and self-organization can yield evolution. Only a dialectic of natural selection and spontaneous order and autonomous entities can generate the diversity of living forms and life functions and yield continued transformation.

Still, if natural selection is no longer su%cient, nor even $rst among equals, it matters much and crucially. But just what is selected? Richard Dawkins has (in)famously argued that a gene is a “replicator,” that is, a molecule with “the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself”; and all organisms—humans, other animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria—are mere “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the sel$sh molecules known as genes” (2006, xxi). Dawkins says many more things than this about the sel!sh gene, much of it true, no doubt; but it is his notion of “the long reach of the gene,” of what he calls the extended phenotype, that is of most interest in the present context—and would have most interested Sartre, I think.

Very loosely, phenotype is to genotype as the volume you are holding is to the manuscript from which it was produced. “!e phenotypic e"ects of a gene are normally seen as all the e"ects that it has on the body in which it sits. . . . But [in truth] the phenotypic e"ects of a gene need to be thought of as all the e-ects that it has on the world.” Genes, Dawkins argues, can act at a distance, not just on the organism itself. “%e whole world is criss-crossed with causal arrows joining genes to phenotypic e-ects, far and near.” !us, “A beaver lake is . . . a phenotype, no less than the beaver’s teeth and tail” (2006, 247). A beaver’s genes $nd expression far beyond the tip of her tail.

And here is where Dawkins has not taken seriously enough the evolutionary and ecological implications of his own theory. “!e world”

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is not simply given to the organism to adapt to; the environment—as we are wont to call it—is not just there to be $tted into. Again, the given must always be taken in some way. In manifold ways, at every level, from the bacterium to the bison to the beehive to the biosphere, the world is, at least in part, made by living organisms. !e environment is as much a product of life as it is the place where life happens. Here enters the theory of “niche construction”:

Niche construction is one of the de$ning features of life, there is no stage at which we could say . . . that [the environment] preceded niche constructing organisms. From the beginning of life, all organisms have, in part, [and in substantial ways,] modi$ed their selective environments. (Laland 2004, 319, my glosses)

Better than a beaver, the paramount example of a niche constructor may be the earthworm. #at makes the earthworm so special in this regard is that its physiology is utterly ill-suited for life on land. Earthworms are far better suited for life in fresh water, a scarce resource in terrestrial soils. To put it simply, earthworms have $sh kidneys, and so they must continuously build the wet world to which they are adapted out of the dry one in which they $nd themselves. “It is, in other words, the soil environment adapting to the earthworm, not the other way around” (Turner 2000, 118). !e soil is a carefully turned and tuned milieu, not so much satisfying as subserving the needs of the peculiar annelids who fashion their world so that they can escape the freshwater aquatic lifestyle they seem better adapted to. In short, worms build the soil that allows them to be the terrestrial annelids they have made themselves into. Earthworms do not simply live in the soil, they make their world, to say nothing of the ways in which they fashion a crucial piece of ours.6 And so it is with all living beings, each in its own way. !e transformation of life is active, open, integrative. In a word, it is dialectical.

4.4 Interior Relations: Systems, Superorganisms, and Planets#at of biological facts in their relation of interiority, Sartre’s fourth criterion? An answer to this, again, perhaps surprisingly, can begin with Earth System Science. Earth System Science—as its name suggests—emphasizes Earth’s character as a system. It takes as its primary object of study the whole planet. It studies the Earth by examining its structural parts—e.g., biomes, ecosystems, communities, populations, watersheds, etc.—and the functional interactions within and among those parts—e.g., energy &ows, materials cycling, stochastic processes, and so on. Drawing heavily upon the descriptive and explanatory toolkit of general

6. See Montgomery 2007.

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systems theory—which includes but is not limited to an emphasis on parts and wholes, on stability and integrity, on linear and nonlinear dynamics, and on networks of interconnections and feedback relations among the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of the Earth—this approach represents a dramatic shift in the understanding of our home planet. !e central $nding of Earth System Science is well-summarized in the “Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change”:

!e Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components. !e interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-scale temporal and spatial variability. !e understanding of the natural dynamics of the Earth System has advanced greatly in recent years and provides a sound basis for evaluating the e"ects and consequences of human-driven change. (Moore et al. 2009)

#ile there were hints of an Earth system sensibility even in the late nineteenth century, the $eld has really come into its own only in the past few decades (Langmuir and Broecker 2012).

It is only a short step—logically forward, chronologically backward—from Earth System Science to the more provocative (and evocative) second-order systems view proposed by the atmospheric chemist James Lovelock in his (in)famous “Gaia hypothesis.” First proposed in 1973 (Lovelock 2000 [1973]), the original idea—that life on Earth unconsciously generates and maintains conditions suitable to life—has developed into an empirically robust and successfully predictive theoretical perspective. At $rst glance Gaia !eory seems much like Earth System Science. But Lovelock’s suggestion di"ers from Earth System Science in at least three important respects, centering on three key notions for the Gaian or “geophysiological” approach: strong biotic-abiotic coupling, planetary evolution, and emergent homeostasis.

Perhaps the most important emergent earth property is its self-regulation. !is notion is central to both the Earth system and the Gaian or “geophysiological” approaches. #ile both perspectives hold that self-regulation occurs, they disagree on its nature, extent, and signi$cance. Regulation from the systems perspective is concerned with the ways the living and nonliving components of the system conjointly a-ect such aspects as climate, the chemistry of fresh and salt water, availability of nutrients in soil, and so on. !is view of self-regulation has the rather passive and mechanistic meaning that, simply put, this would be a very di"erent planet without life. So far, so good. On Lovelock’s account, in addition to mere interaction between life and the environment, the Earth system’s elements are integrated; and in addition to mere impact, the Earth system’s self-regulatory function

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has a goal. “Gaia theory is about the evolution of a tightly coupled system whose constituents are the biota and their material environment, which comprises the atmosphere, the oceans, and the surface rocks. Self-regulation of important properties, such as climate and chemical composition, is seen as a consequence of this evolutionary process” (1991). Against biological orthodoxy, Lovelock unabashedly employs teleological language to describe this tightly coupled system, and for a simple reason: every system has a goal. “Show me a system that doesn’t have a goal, and I’ll show you why it’s not a system” (personal conversation). Like any working system, regulation is regulation toward something. Otherwise it becomes unclear why the language of self-regulation need be invoked at all. Gaia is “a physiological system [not a mere physical system] because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life” (2006, 15, emphasis and gloss added). !is assertion, perhaps above all, separates Gaian science from Earth System Science, which in an arguably incoherent e"ort to avoid any hint of teleology, a%rms directionless self-regulation. !e goal of the system is to keep the planet habitable.

Gaian science is explicit in its use of physiological themes and motifs. And the analogy is apt. Anatomy and physiology are of a piece, concerned as they are with the speci$c structures of an organism and the character of the coupling among those structures and, in turn, the speci$c signi$cance of that coupling for the organism. For Earth System Science, the coupling is there, but it is weak. For Gaian science it is really a matter of robust functional coupling between living and nonliving aspects of Earth, understood as strongly analogous to the integrative and dynamic functional coupling of the structures of a living organism’s metabolic process. It is this coupling that permits autonomous pursuit of an organism’s goals, and it is this same sense of coupling that permits Gaia’s pursuit of its goal of habitable conditions.

!ough early Gaian theorists employed the language of homeostasis, many now prefer the term homeorrhesis—not too hot, not too cold, just comfortable enough for a particular family of life to make a living for a while. Homeorrhesis, unlike the stricter notion of homeostasis, allows for considerable &exibility and periodic shifts in the regulatory function, at once consistent with a broad range of habitable conditions and long periods of relative stability and episodes of dramatic (and sometimes catastrophic) change and an ever-changing panoply of life on (or near) the ever-changing planetary surface (Lenton and Watson 2011).

Lastly, Gaia theory has been extended in work on environmental evolution, that is, the history of life and its environment as a co-evolutionary niche constructing phenomenon at the planetary scale. !e integrative Earth system is now understood to be a biogeochemically evolving entity, a delimitable unity that changes over time in a manner broadly consistent with the

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mechanisms of natural selection even if it is not a unit of selection, pace Dawkins. As Lynn Margulis outlines the claim,

In our view, autopoiesis of the planet is the aggregate, emergent property of the many gas-trading, gene-exchanging, growing, and evolving organisms in it. As human body regulation of temperature and blood chemistry emerges from relations among the body’s component cells, so planetary regulation evolved from eons of interactions among Earth’s living inhabitants. (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 23)

And !ompson chimes in:

We all are used to thinking that the biosphere is constrained by and adapted to its terrestrial environment. But the Gaia hypothesis proposes that there is a circularity here: this terrestrial environment is itself the result of what the biosphere did to it. . . . As a result the entire biosphere/Earth “Gaia” has an identity as a whole, an adaptable and plastic unity, acquired through time in this dynamic partnership between life and its terrestrial environment. (!ompson 1991, 69)

!e descriptions of Earth System scientists suggest a profound degree of self-organization at the planetary scale that strikes many as counterintuitive; and the explanations of geophysiologists suggest such a complex degree of directional integrativity at such massive spatial and temporal scales that it strikes many as downright impossible. It becomes easier to imagine the Earth as a self-organizing and self-regulating system—and, if we follow the geophysiologists, as an integrative, goal-oriented, resilient, organism-like if not properly living entity—in light of the sorts of smaller and (seemingly) simpler subsystems at once discreetly nested within and collectively constituting the biosphere itself. !ink once more of the beehive, the bison, the bacterium—all the way back down to the collectively autocatalytic molecular reactions with which I began this section. It is not such a philosophical stretch to imagine that what holds at the “bottom” holds for the “top,” as both the Earth systems and geophysiological approaches to life clearly demonstrate. Nor is it such a stretch to conceive this whole-Earth phenomenon in terms of a complex evolving web of interior relations, as Sartre insists we must.

4.5 Irreducibility: Ontology, Epistemology, MereologyAs a $nal stop on this brief exploration of recent life science, what of Sartre’s overarching concern with the irreducibility of life to dead matter? We may consider the work of Richard Lewontin (an evolutionary biologist and geneticist) and Richard Levins (a mathematical ecologist). In their now classic %e Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin raise a

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familiar complaint about natural science. Mainstream scienti$c theory and practice is essentially “Cartesian.”

In the Cartesian world . . . the world as a clock, phenomena are the consequences of the coming together of atomistic bits, each with its own intrinsic properties, determining the behavior of the system as a whole. Lines of causality run from part to whole, from atom to molecule, from molecule to organism, from organism to collectivity. As in society, so in all of nature, the part is ontologically prior to the whole. (1985, 2, emphases added)

It all (or nearly all) comes down to parts and wholes and relations between them, provided only that we admit the primacy of the part.

On Levins and Lewontin’s account, there is something mereologically awry in mainstream science. Parts are privileged, wholes are neglected, causality is upward, and multivalent interrelationality is rejected. !is systematic ontological apartheid makes it all but impossible to account for and respond appropriately to the scintillating complexity of Earth and its life forms and relations among them—all of them, including us.

!e concern, it must be noted, is both about how to know and about what there is to know. “Cartesianism is more than simply a method of investigation; it is a commitment to how things really are” (1985, 2, emphasis added). !e Cartesianism of mainstream science is thus at once an epistemological in.ection of and an ontological extrapolation from what Sartre calls analytical reason. And to ask which came $rst, the in&ection or the extrapolation, is to miss the dialectical point and to risk positivist obfuscation and mysti$cation. Analytical reason is a useful tool in the search for truth, a necessary but insu%cient moment of a dialectical ontology of knowing. It becomes a lie if taken as the truth itself. !is abiding Cartesianism, both ontological and epistemological, is the deep source of the critical, practical, and socio-political failings of mainstream science.

Levins and Lewontin o"er a correction and a solution. Near the end of %e Dialectical Biologist, they write,

In the dialectical world view, things are assumed from the beginning to be internally heterogeneous at every level. And this heterogeneity does not mean that the object or system is composed of $xed natural units. Rather, the “correct” division of the whole into parts varies, depending upon the particular aspect of the whole that is in question. . . . In the dialectical world the logical dialectical relation between part and whole is taken seriously. Part makes whole, and whole makes part. (272)

!e solution, then, is not just to reprioritize. It is not so simple as to say that wholes are more important than parts, as advocates of certain

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varieties of mystifying holism would have it. It is that neither part nor whole can be comprehended separately. I quote at length:

“Part” and “whole” have a special relationship to each other, in that one cannot exist without the other, any more than “up” can exist without “down.” #at constitutes the parts is de$ned by the whole that is being considered. Moreover, parts acquire properties by virtue of being parts of a particular whole, properties they do not have in isolation or as parts of another whole. It is not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts acquire new properties. But as the parts acquire properties by being together, they impart to the whole new properties, which are re&ected in changes in the parts, and so on. Parts and wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves. !ese are the properties of things we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration. (ibid., 3)

#ile at $rst glance their self-described work in “dialectical biology” might seem less of a development in theoretical and empirical science than a development in the philosophy of science, the theory-practice distinction upon which such an assessment rests is perhaps the clearest index of the very problem Levins and Lewontin (and Sartre in his own way) hope to overcome. !us what I earlier called “good science” has not so much rejected the classical reductionist project as it has transcended it in a dialectical Aufhebung of deterministic reduction and irreducible holism to yield a properly reductionist/holist dialectic that takes the whole world seriously, from the bacterium to the bison to the beehive to the biome, and to Beijing. !is is a scientist’s solution to a philosopher’s problem that Sartre could happily, even if not wholly, endorse.

5. Concluding Unscienti"c Question: “More Interesting” After All?

%us, in the light of modern knowledge, man is beginning to discern more clearly what wise men of all ages have intuitively felt—his essential unity with the Universe; and the unity of his puny e-orts with the trend of all Nature. A race with desires all opposed to Nature could not long endure; he that survives must, for that very fact, be in some measure a collaborator with Nature.

—Alfred Lotka, Principles of Physical Biology

Nature is no mere mélange, no aggregation of parts, reducible, closed, passive, and gathered loosely together in exteriority. Nature is a dynamic and generative web of parts in wholes and wholes in parts, irreducible, open, active, integrative. In this sense, among others, Nature is like, or

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at least not so unlike, free organic praxis itself, an irreducible, open-ended, active, and integrative fashioning of self and world.7 Perhaps Nature is even a “totalization without a totalizer,” as Sartre might have it. Perhaps not. In any case, as Joseph Catalano reminds us, Sartre knew well that “in our present history, Earth itself is such a region of totalizations” (Catalano 2010, 64).

For Sartre, recall, “the dialectic is at the start only the real movement of a unity in process of being made and not the study, not even the ‘functional’ and ‘dynamic’ study, of a unity already made” (1963, 69). !ere are more than hints of this sensibility in the new sciences of life and complexity. !e cumulative theoretical and empirical developments of these sciences are decidedly dialectical—even if not precisely in Sartre’s sense of the term, even if most practicing scientists have not adopted a dialectical lexicon, even if there is not yet a full-blown dialectics of Nature, and even if there never will be. At every scale, from the biosphere to the biome to the beehive to the bison to the bacterium, evidence and understanding are mounting, and all of it in a more and more dialectical manner than science has ever before managed to imagine or muster. And perhaps most important, these developments, I think, promise a new and scienti!cally dialectical manner of grasping “the meaning of the present as such” (1963b, 133), as Sartre insists we must. If there is to be a natural history worth examining, let alone a dialectics of Nature worth imagining, minimally, all of animate nature must be in some strong and demonstrable sense autonomous and generative of an always open natural future, a future that is dialectically entangled in a co-constitutive relation with the human task of making human history; and maximally all of nature, animate and inanimate, must $nd a place within this nonlinear and dynamic open project of historical totalization, of all of life making a natural history collaboratively. And so it seems to be, more and more.

Here one more caveat is in order. My contention is that most of the $ve conditions Sartre set have now been partially met in nontrivial, non-“dogmatic” and “interesting” ways; or at least conditions very much like them have. Bear in mind also that if we take seriously the contentions of many practicing scientists, all of Sartre’s requirements are likely to be met in this century (e.g., Kau"mann 2000), and in ways that few in Sartre’s time could have anticipated. Admittedly, these are strong claims, and expectations regarding what may or may not happen by century’s end are speculative. Good scientists and those enamored of good science (among whom I must count myself) are all too often overly sanguine about the prospects for future scienti$c progress. Only

7.  See my “Sartre’s Integrative Method: Description, Dialectics, and Praxis” (Ally 2010) for a critical exposition of Sartre’s theory of praxis.

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time will tell. Nonetheless, I have here been concerned only with the $rst claim of progress, regarding the enormous theoretical and empirical strides that have been made toward satisfying Sartre’s demands in the decades since the end of his productive career. !is claim is not at all speculative. !e science is there. !ough I have provided only a sketch of a defense in the short space of this essay, to repeat, the empirical evidence is mounting and the theoretical developments are compelling. (A more thorough defense on properly scienti$c grounds is better left to philosophically inclined scientists, for they are in the best position to handle the details, many of which involve expertise in mathematical formalization, computer modeling, experimental technique, and a working familiarity with the burgeoning body of data and theory.) And in any case, it is clear that much of what is happening speaks directly to Sartre’s particular concerns, as expressed in that ponderous footnote.

Sartre, if not Lukacs, would have to concur: contemporary science demonstrates to a moral certainty the historical character of Nature; it demonstrates the prospects for a properly dialectical natural history; and it does more than hint at the continued interest of the question of a Dialectics of Nature.

And is this so shocking, after all? As Sartre repeatedly insists, “methods are modi$ed because they are applied to new objects” (1963b, 7); “method is created through the very work itself in obedience to the requirements of its object” (1981, x, emphasis added). Method develops and changes in conjunction with the object it is intended to elucidate, which is just to say that substance, too, develops and changes and rami$es across time. For method and substance are only heuristically separable. Dialectically, they are one. Our method must adapt because our object always changes. And so, perhaps, there is a Dialectics of Nature worth imagining after all. Perhaps nature displays the very openness and integrativity of praxis, the active reaching toward novelty that must be fashioned into a future worth wanting. Call it a habitable planet, if you like, call it a world worth living in: habitability and livability are de$ning themes of Sartre’s dialectical ontology of praxis, for all known praxis happens on this singular planet, in this one world.

!ough I do not claim to have wholly defended the claim here, the cumulative e"ect of the many scienti$c developments discussed above has, I think, undeniably rendered the hypothesis of a dialectics of Nature “interesting,” and in a most dialectical way, to wit by at once establishing and contradicting that selfsame hypothesis. And let us be clear, nature as such never was the object of Sartre’s concern, for he saw no way to subsume it under the narrow “for us” that oriented and

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motivated all of his inquiries.8 In rejecting a dialectics of Nature as often as he did, Sartre was only rejecting a particular and &awed way of doing ontology from the angle of a question he had already set aside because he was concerned with a di"erent part of the whole; and, given his political and ethical and ever-heuristic stance, he saw $t to think that part apart from the whole. Again, he never ruled out that sort of thinking, a properly naturalistic dialectical holism, on principle.

In my view—and in Sartre’s, too, albeit for di"erent reasons—questions of possible relations among history, dialectics, science, and nature have been thrown out of focus (and out of fashion) by the long chronicle of Marxist/anti-Marxist polemics that are not, in principle or in practice, intrinsic to the questions themselves. !is is not to say that the views of Marx and Engels and their interpreters are irrelevant to our contemporary socioecological concerns—far from it. It is just to say that, given the complexity and urgency and novelty of the planetary socioecological crisis, questions concerning Nature’s nature and Earth’s nature, and by extension the question of the proper place of humankind on Earth at this historical juncture, are among the most relevant questions imaginable, no matter what one’s political-economic predilections. To ask these questions in light of dialectics, whether as a method of inquiry, as a substantive orientation, or both, as Sartre would have it, is today anything but a partisan a"air. Dialectics is, for Sartre, about the living contradiction that we are and that we must be in this material universe on this planet amidst myriads of other creatures and powers. Like our present historical moment, the dialectic of Sartre’s own intellectual trajectory itself demands that such questions about Nature and the human place be raised anew, and that they be asked and answered in new ways, and in ways that take us through the very real contradictions of the human world, in order to pass beyond them. Indeed, to avoid such questions is, at best, a dangerous gamble. At worst, it may turn out to be folly.

!ings have changed. In both our theoretical understanding of Nature and our practical relation to the Earth and with the broader earth community of which we are a part, we now face the greatest challenge our species has ever known. It matters little whether we speak of a dialectics of Nature, or of autopoietic nature, or of autonomous nature, or of a living Earth, or even of Gaia. We are an inextricable part of natural history, and nature is historical. !ere is a natural dialectics, as is amply demonstrated by the new sciences of life and complexity,

8.  !is “for us” is an umbrella term for what I call Sartre’s “re&exive anthropocentrism,” “naïve instrumentalism,” “heuristic exceptionalism,” and “historical exclusivism.” For a constructive overcoming of these challenges, see my A Case Study in Existential Ecology: Bringing Sartre to the Biosphere (forthcoming).

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and by the praxis of the new scientists, themselves, our own latter-day natural philosophers.

Perhaps Sartre, concrete-loving bug-hater that he was, had some small glimpse of this, even if only for long enough to write a long and prescient and hastily constructed footnote in a long and prescient and hastily constructed book. In another such footnote, near the end of the manuscript of volume II of that same work, Sartre concludes his discussion of the “singularity of praxis” thusly:

[Action] as an exteriorization of the inert by the organism, completes the circle by reinteriorizing itself. In order to restore organic integrity, or in order to safeguard it, it decides—in certain speci$c sectors—to replace life by the act. It is in the perspective of this governed circularity . . . that everything becomes an act in the practical $eld. . . . !e direct movement of praxis remains that of an organism (or organized group) striving to make its material milieu into a combination of inert elements favorable to its life. So the practical $eld—as a fundamental, real but abstract uni$cation of all the surrounding elements—is the totalization of possible means; or—which amounts to the same thing—the matrix of real means. (1991b, 383)

It seems highly improbable that scientists would ever say anything in quite this way—for which we may be grateful! But many scientists are saying this very thing, or something very much like it, in many other ways. Praxis is just the task of building an earthly future worth wanting out of a troubled world that was built by prior praxis. #at we now know better than we ever have before is that we are not alone in our earthly and worldly project, nor have we ever been, nor could we ever be.

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