Productive and Reductive versus Romantic Sciences

As Nassar (2022, 1) argues of the Romantic Empiricists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe, and Johann Gottfried Herder (and others):

These thinkers are romantic not only because they were contemporaries of the Jena romantics, but also, and more significantly, because they developed an approach to the study of nature in which the arts and aesthetic experience play a crucial role. They are empiricist because they emphasize observation and seek to remain with the phenomena. They are critical of systematic approaches to nature that begin with an abstract idea or postulate.

In other words, these thinkers were neither wholists nor reductionists. Up to (I argue) the middle of the twentieth century, there were materialists, dualists, wholists, and even pantheists and non-reductive materialists. Looking back beyond the middle part of the twentieth century to “see” modern science is folly and misleading. The emerging sciences of the time included both the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) and what we now call the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Ernst Haeckel, the “German Darwin” and so-called father of modern ecology, for instance, offered up a form of triune monism to describe a non-reductive materiality. His was also an effort to understand the evolution of forms and feelings from the mineral to the plant, animal, and human worlds. Perhaps his most famous quote summing up his non-reductive materialism is: “The whole marvelous panorama of life that spreads over the surface of our globe is, in the last analysis, transformed sunlight” (Haeckel 1900). Clearly an empirical, but not reductive, insight (Bauman 2024).

Again, during the two world wars, science (and just the natural sciences, leaving behind the human sciences) became attached to technology transfer such as weapons and chemicals, and then after, agricultural technologies and other fossil-fueled technologies of production, transportation, and communication. As Freya Matthews has argued, there was much more of an understanding within science prior to this reductive and productive era that the scientific project was about encounters with rather than knowledge of planetary others. She offers an understanding of “encounter” versus “explanation” in terms of knowledge-making practices, writing:

Where knowledge in the traditional sense then seeks to explain, encounter seeks to engage. Knowledge seeks to break open the mystery of another’s nature; encounter leaves that mystery intact . . . Knowledge provides closure on the future, hence control and security. Encounter is open-ended, allowing for spontaneity and entailing vulnerability. That is why encounter is erotic. (Matthews 2003, 78)

Something like Petersen’s transcendental naturalism, which takes an agnostic approach to what we might call foundations, teloi, and essences, enables us to have actual conversations, encounters in which we learn from the others we are in dialogue with. A tree is not just a piece of lumber or a log but part of a community and an entity in its own right. Earth, air, fire, and water are not enframed by human reason and merely made use of (Heidegger 1977) but rather are the common elements of all life on the planet that enable any possibility for encounter in the first place.

Another area of scholarship that would provide good conversation partners with Petersen’s work is the immense body of literature around emergence theory, the science of how new “levels” and modes of life emerge in the process that cannot be reduced to the “levels” before them. It seems to me this is a model for thinking about science that does not so much call for a transcendental component but relies on the open-ended process of entangled entities naturing again and again. Newness emerges as a result of this ongoing process of entangled planetary evolution. I wonder what transcendental naturalism would have to say to emergence theory. The same can be said for process thought and other modes of pantheistic and panentheistic thinking, especially the world of Catherine Keller (2014) and her theo-poetics, which draws from older theologies of uncertainty such as Nicolas of Cusa as well as the uncertainty of certain interpretations of the quantum world. Indeed, probably the closest way of thinking to Petersen’s I can think of would be something like process thought, in which the possibilities for becoming provide the transcendence for each entity on a moment-by-moment basis. Each entity, in a way, “prehends” the past, “imagines” the best possible future for becoming, and then becomes in a way that is influenced by the many other entangled and becoming entities that make up the planetary community.

Finally, I wonder if there are productive differences to be found with other new materialisms, including my own version of Critical Planetary Romanticism that relies on what I would call a viable agnosticism. Much like the late Michael Ruse (2021; whom Petersen mentions), I argue that rather than filling uncertainty with everything (a full blown theism) or nothing (a full blown atheism), which are two sides of the same coin, the best stance toward thinking about how we might know the evolving planetary community is a stance that keeps that uncertainty open: hence a viable (livable) agnosticism. In other words, even with modern Western scientific technologies, we can only “see” so far into the cosmic past, not beyond the Big Bang or the cosmic microwave background. We can only see so far into the tiniest subatomic and quantum levels as well. Or, on a personal level, we can only see so far into the past until it shades off into the mystery before we were born, or into the future when we know at some point we will be no longer. Instead of filling these spaces with everything or nothing, let them stand as mysteries, where future possibilities for becoming can emerge. These spaces of future possibilities are where I think ethics and politics can emerge in a post-foundational way.

Since Petersen’s book, in the end, also addresses one of the most pressing planetary problems, human-caused climate change, what are the common grounds we can agree on (grounds not foundations) from which we can stand to face uncertainty, and experience wonder at the rest of the natural world (Kearns and Keller 2007)? There is a difference between thinking of language as not having a direct relationship to the material world and maintaining a viable agnosticism, and fake news, alternative facts, anything goes. I am not saying that Petersen in any way advocates an anything goes approach, but it is important to think about the structures that might help us navigate between uncertainty and fake news/alternative facts. Especially now!

So, what are structures that help us create the planetary public spaces necessary to have real conversations, and create new ways of becoming and new technologies that help us build different future worlds together? It is one thing to call for a type of model or method that assumes a “transcendental naturalism” or “new materialism,” but it is another to think about how to build the spaces necessary for such thinking. In many places, these spaces for thinking together in uncertain ways, in ways that might actually lead to real conversations (and the ability to be converted), are retreating behind nationalisms and localisms or doom and gloom, all of which involve a type of certainty of one’s own perspective that eclipses the possibility for thinking in planetary (rather than localistic/nationalistic) ways. How can we begin to think together in a fast-paced, fossil-fueled world, for instance, that barely enables the space to breathe? What spaces do we need to create that will help us slow down and think of new ways forward?

This gets at the politics of the matter that to some extent I want to see more of in my own and Petersen’s future work: How do we get to common grounds in a world of anthropocentrism, colonization, and inequalities based upon embodiments? We need critical theories to address how multiple embodiments experience “nature” and “climate change” in different and unequal ways. Again, following Descola and James, Petersen does touch on the pluriverse, or what I would call the need for understanding the co-construction of multiple worlds that link together at any given moment to make up the planetary. Yet, I was looking for more insights from embodied theories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, decoloniality, and so on. It seems that if different bodies experience and know the world differently, a “better” understanding of the planetary community would be one that listens to as many voices and bodies as possible (human and nonhuman) in thinking about the planet. Much like a scatter plot chart, some voices would fall too far outside the circle to integrate into a program for addressing, let’s say, climate change. So, we collect, think about the technologies and worlds we need to cocreate to address these problems, but then pay deep attention to those voices at the edges as they build up until, as Latour (2004) might argue, we have to collect again in a new and different way. From my own dealing with performativity and queer theory, I argue that these abjected bodies and voices are the remainders that make up a space of “transcendence,” or what I might call emergent possibilities. As such, these bodies should not be made to fit into preexisting models but rather remain at the edges to haunt any world constructions we might come up with from falling for the lure of certainty.

Knowledge and Ethics without Transcendence

Here at the end of this article, I want to explore what types of knowledge and ethics might work from within the imminent frameworks of new materialisms and even “transcendent(al) naturalisms.” I think the answer lies in a move away from metaphysics and ontology toward aesthetics and ethics. To explain further, I see two broad systems of knowledge production that provide us different ethical and aesthetic ends: one I call reductive and one I call connective.

The reductive model of knowledge, which I call the “Mint Julep” model,¹ is one that reduces knowledge to single perspectives, truths, and approaches. You can find this model in the dogmatism of the far right and the far left. You can find it in the fundamentalism of religious beliefs. You can also find it in some versions of scientific reductionism: it is all in the genes, or its all chemical, or it is all in the neurons, or more broadly, the idea that science is all there is and all that matters. This model tends to place (some) humans as “exceptional” to the rest of the natural world and somehow capable of having an objective, birds-eye view of it, which they can explain to everyone else. This view, because it argues for a single perspective/truth, places a single human perspective as the correct perspective. There are, in other words, no critical approaches to knowledge, but there is just correct knowledge, and everyone must assent or capitulate to it. It is this type of reductive knowledge that eliminates all other perspectives than “the one” (usually the one staring back at you in the mirror).

The connective model of knowledge (following Matthews’s ideas discussed earlier) operates from a different starting point. We humans are a part of an evolving community of life, and there is no outside space from which to gain an objective, birds-eye view of the world. In fact, no such space exists; there are just multiple perspectives of the common planet on which we live that we co-constitute and are co-constituted by. This is not about relativity, or anything goes; rather, it is about embodiment and context. If we emerge from an immanent process of planetary becoming, then each embodiment/entity within that planetary becoming has something unique to tell us about the makeup of the planetary community at any given time. From the perspective of this type of knowledge, the gauge of whether knowledge is “good,” and whether an action is “good,” is how much it helps us think with others (both human and nonhuman) and work toward co-constructing worlds that provide political spaces for multiple perspectives and ways of being/becoming to thrive. Certainty and single-mindedness are the enemies of this system of knowledge production.

As the reader is likely aware, I am partial to the connective model, and for good reasons. I think this type of knowledge creates more connection between the humus (earth) of humanity and humility and the humus that is the dirt of the Earth. It goes a long way to prevent knowledge (and some humans) from fleeing the planet and its many creatures. This connective form of knowledge also helps foster compassion: we can identify the ways in which multiple others are suffering as a result of long histories of colonization, human exceptionalism, sexism, racism, and genocide. With knowledge focused on humility and compassion, we might build genuine political spaces of conversation: spaces in which we enter dialogue with the genuine possibility of being converted by other perspectives. Finally, from these spaces of political dialogue and conversation (again in the Arendtian sense), we might find new companions: companions we not only share bread with but more broadly food and all other earthly resources. Here at the end of this article, let me elaborate on these guides for critically, planetarily, and romantically re-attuning to the worlds around us.