To describe the historiography of our ongoing ecological crisis, we need to return to the Greeks, for the words we use to describe it are Greek. Take, for instance, the word ecology, built on the Greek words oikos and logos. Ecology is the science of the home, the environment, and ecosystems. Yet, its philosophical meaning has not quite been grasped. Philosophy never defined it. I will argue that the history of philosophy can teach us something about this term. Oikos also refers to another Greek word, oikéiosis. Oikéiosis means appropriation. How can we think of appropriation and conciliation together? How can a non-predatory appropriation of nature be conceived, compatible with all living things and the balance of life? The hypothesis of my book, The Ecology of History, is this: human history is the history of appropriations (technical, political, economic, etc.). Heidegger maintained that history was the history of being; in this sense we can say, that it is the history of having.
What must be rethought is our understanding of having, or the lack thereof. For the Greeks, “to have” does not equate to possession. Rather, it signifies a process of self-appropriation. This process enables us to appropriate ourselves according to what is suitable or fitting to survive. To appropriate, then, is to render a milieu or environment one’s own. But it also means becoming oneself, according to what is good and useful for oneself. “Having” in the Greek sense is thus neither a technical, nor a political or economic concept. It is a biological, ethical, ecological concept. The “eco” in eco-logy is to be understood as oikos and oikéiosis. In turn, the question one must ask is: what kind of home or environment must we live in to live appropriately? How can nature and human nature coexist?
To understand this, we must consider an additional meaning of oikéiosis: to reconcile. This conciliation must be thought of as re-conciliation. How can we live adequately with our milieu? How can we coexist with our environment and the living? How can humans reconcile with non-human life? How can we live appropriately in this shared having of the living? To emerge from the Anthropocene, we need to further deconstruct our categories of thought and our language.
Today’s ecological emergency is a historical emergency: firstly, political ecology is the historical challenge of our generation and future ones. For Hegel, the meaning of history was the universal liberation of mankind. For Heidegger, the meaning of history is to escape from the forgetting of being. Isn’t the meaning of history today to save terrestrial life? In other words, the meaning of history, for us, is for human history to retain both meaning and a future. The ecological crisis is tied to our Western metaphysics and their appropriationist logic. There are two forms of appropriation: a good and a bad kind. The former refers to the Greek word oikéiosis. The latter refers to the Greek word ktésis. Ktésis means material possession. Socrates likens it to owning a coat without wearing it. It is an accumulation of goods, objects, and possessions that have no use, tied to the belief that nature and the human are discontinuous. This is what Philippe Descola calls naturalism: man sees itself as spiritually superior to nature. Which is why nature is, in turn, seen as property. Heidegger, on the other hand, speaks of Gestell: technical installations whose purpose is to transform nature into economic and calculable resources.
This is why the concept of “appropriation” must be redefined. For our history is the result of predation and appropriationist privatization. The Anthropocene operates through this historical movement to capture what is common: nature and energy. Leaving the Anthropocene requires a different attention towards the concept of “appropriation”. It has not always meant predation, possession, or privatization. First and foremost, it implied a necessity to allow what is living to live according to its appropriate necessities for its survival. It has thus meant living according to what is appropriate for one’s nature and nature in general. Ecology can be written as echology. The prefix echo- refers to ekhein and oikéiosis. Political ecology thereby determines what is appropriate for the conciliation of life-forms. Philosophy, from Socrates to the Stoics, has thought of something like ecology. I am trying to point out this legacy and sustain it. The scandal is that ecology depends on having and not on being.
But we must not be naive. The appropriation of our environment is a necessity. We must contain nature, not possess it. It was necessary for mankind to master fire. The cooking of meat and preservation of food enabled neuronal and physical development. Mankind protected itself from the elements and predators. It invented medicine to treat disease. It invented agriculture to feed its kin. Not all appropriation is bad. It becomes bad when it is but a morbid possession, when it deregulates the harmony of life. Modernity has changed history. We all know Descartes’ phrase: “to become as masters and possessors of Nature.” From thereon, the world’s destiny shifted. Mastery became possession and ownership. This is not Descartes’ fault; the French philosopher wanted to improve technical inventions. There were three reasons for this: first, so that man could eat his fill; second, to heal body and soul; third, to increase life expectancy. In the 19th century, we became the owners of Nature. This privatization of the world destroyed non-human and human life. As the title of this symposium shows, there is indeed a double finitude. Modernity is finished, for its project has destroyed the world. We must think beyond it and be post-modern. And the world, too, is finished. The concept of the world has lost its meaning. We no longer know what “world-making” signifies.
The reconciliation of the human and the non-human living demands the rethinking of the question of the world. For the Greeks, the world was a kosmos. For the Romans, the world was nature defined by laws. In the Middle Ages, the world was an orb governed by God. For the Moderns, it was a kind of harmony. Despite different understandings, the world was a good and beautiful order. It was, in fact, a cosmetics. The word cosmetics comes from the Greek kosmos. The kosmos was a coherent, ordered, and harmonious whole. By cosmetics, we mean the harmonious co-ordination of the living and the non-living in relation to their environment. Biologically, this conciliation of the living is the condition for the permanence of earthly life. Politically, cosmetics aims to repair ecological damage and restore beauty and harmony to the world. Harmony is a relationship of parts to a whole that is effective. A living organism is harmonious. So is an ecosystem. This harmony is the beauty of the world and of life. The aim of all political ecology is to create a cosmetics.
Rethinking history means rethinking appropriation and the world. It also means understanding that philosophy and science define our relationship with the world. For instance, every cosmology brings along and corresponds to a representation of the political. Every cosmology is consistent with the hegemonic model of political organization of its epoch. Cosmology is not neutral. Every philosophy is a political decision. The same applies to scientific models. The Greek kosmos is consistent with Athenian democracy, where order is harmonious (where the interest of each is conditional on the interest of all). The natural laws of the Latins matched an Empire with a powerful magistracy. The orb of the Middle Ages is consistent with a monarchy of divine right (the king being God’s representative on Earth). And the harmony of the Moderns is consistent with the liberal state, where law is meant to reconcile differences.
To think the concept of ecology, we need to consider these different eras. The essence of politics is not political; perhaps it is cosmological. Or vice versa. To know where we are going, we must remember where we have begun. Our future has a past. The ecological crisis has a history. How can we change the world in the present? We live in an age of acosmism. Acosmism is the fact that there is a world, but this world is no longer political. The world is planetary, and the planetary corresponds to economic globalization. The Greek word for planet is plainesthai, meaning “Wandering star”. We are errant. Globalization has no political project but the privatization and possession of nature. It is the conversion of natural resources into financial ones. How can we move beyond globalization and the Anthropocene? By understanding that having is a requirement. Having is not static possession; it is dynamic. We must be more careful. It is a duty and a political effort.
This political effort is also a legal one. A right to nature must be thought. As Bolivia, Colombia, and New Zealand have done. Today, the non-human must be tied into notions of legal personhood. Some living beings would thus have rights, as is the case for the Atrato River in Bolivia, the Amazon in Colombia, or the Whanganui River in New Zealand. If non-human life can integrate legal personhood, humans will have to care for them. These rights will ensure that the living live in accordance with what is appropriate for them. The kosmos – or cosmetics – is this coexistence of the living with regards to what is good and useful for their biological continuity. Law is the condition for the co-appropriation of a harmonious world. Law is, therefore, about reparation or restitution. It is about restoring, that is, re-situating, living beings into their proper place in the ecosystemic order.
To conclude and summarize, the current ecological crisis requires us to rethink certain concepts. First of all, appropriation. It is neither possession nor private property, but rather the process of owning oneself according to what is appropriate (good and useful) for adapting to one’s environment. It is a letting-be. Secondly, we need to rethink the world as kosmos or cosmetics. The beauty of the world is its ecosystemic harmony. It is this beauty that we must legally protect. As the Stoics knew, we must “live according to Nature” (vivere secundum naturam). Let us repeat to all the owners depriving us of our common good what Diogenes had said to Alexander the Great: “Get out of my sun.” This phrase is no longer a provocation; it has tangible ecological meaning. Energy and Nature are the commons of life. They are the only universal. The question of universalism needs to be rethought ecologically. As Spinoza said, humans are not “an empire within an empire.” We are Nature. Human and non-human rely on the same energies, the same harmony. All life lives according to what is appropriate for it. All life is linked to other living beings. All life is linked to the kosmos. All life lives from the life of the Whole.