Separating Nature from the World

Abstract

In this final part I will turn my attention to developing a theory of nature using the methods of non-philosophy in the form I have given it in this work, that is, as a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology. This theory of nature will be pursued and developed by way of philosophical and theological material “under-determined” by the immanental ecology sketched out in the last chapter. I follow ecology here insofar as I am able to avoid the need to talk about some hypostasized thing called “Nature.” Rather nature here comes to be a particular name that is productive of thinking or, as Laruelle would say, a force (of) thought. This productivity would be an effect of a conception of nature that is but a name. A non-thetic transcendence that is but a manifestation, as a first name, of the radical immanence of the Real. The point is not, then, a theory of nature within a kind of naturalism developed from ecology rather than from empiricism, but a form of nature that breaks with these sorts of philosophical and theological humiliations of the creatural and instead becomes something of use to creatures. As we said in the last chapter, ecology without nature, by all means, but by way of nature with ecology. By way of a theory of nature that breaks with the circle of Narcissus and Echo present in philosophy and theology by introducing the posture of scientific ecology into philosophical theology.