The Processes of Social Nature: Sovereignty in the Anthropocene

Abstract

How can we understand sovereignty in the Anthropocene? This new climatic regime ushers in a range of challenges to traditional notions of sovereignty in International Relations including declarations of ultimate state territorial control over an ‘inert’ natural world. To answer this question, this article draws from work on the deep interconnections between humans and the natural world termed social nature. It argues that these interconnections have given rise to new sovereign governing practices that are limited to the back loop of environmental systems where politics is reorganised into unexpected combinations in order to respond to crises. To address this limitation, this article draws from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and the process-based ontology set out within it to extend, via the domain of physics, the interconnections within social nature to the growth and generation found within the front loop of environmental systems. The sovereign productive power of these interconnections is demonstrated in terms of the continual generative processes that they give rise to and that link all things in the biosphere. This includes the development of human beings as complex organisms with reason, self-consciousness and political thought. The result is a conceptualisation of sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature.

Introduction

Nature does not at all tolerate any final product, nothing permanent, fixed once and for all.

- F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature

How can we understand sovereignty in the Anthropocene? This new climatic regime ushers in the changing composition of the atmosphere, rising seas, the shifting zones of habitability for basic food stuffs, the reformation of landscapes and coastlines, mass extinctions and the threat of systemic environmental collapse. ¹ Such changes significantly challenge some of the presuppositions that inform modern social and political thought, including nature–culture distinctions and subject–object forms of knowledge. ² These presuppositions have underpinned traditional notions of sovereignty in International Relations that position the state as in complete control over its territory, fixed in time and space, and that have separated human activity from an ‘inert’ natural world leaving it open to exploitation. In light of the Anthropocene, this traditional mode of sovereignty, which has accompanied human and political history and practice during modernity and its project of mastery, ³ must be significantly rethought.

The rise of the Anthropocene has prompted multiple reflections on its meaning and generated increasing engagement with its implications particularly in relation to how human beings and our political efforts should now relate to the natural world or Nature. Such efforts often emphasise the complex interdependencies and entangled nature of being that exists between human and non-human entities. This has led to paradoxical conclusions. Human action within the Anthropocene represents both the ‘unprecedented entanglement of human activity on the planet with its species, eco-systems and landscapes while remaining wedded to a position of human universalism and exceptionalism’. ⁴ If the Anthropocene is a result of our impinging upon Earth systems and strata, then this agency must itself be seen as an expression of planetary properties, processes and potentialities. ⁵ The exceptionalism of human intervention as a cause of climate change is difficult to sustain against the backdrop of human agency that is precisely derived from these processes.

In order to address this paradox and rethink the issue of sovereignty in the context of the Anthropocene, this article draws from a particular vein of thought termed ‘social nature’ that emphasises the complex interdependence and entangled nature of being that exists between human and non-human entities. ⁶ Such entanglements allow us to move beyond traditional conceptions of sovereignty in International Relations that are underpinned by a Newtonian-Kantian worldview that separates human beings from the natural world and positions the state as the ultimate authority and inviolable determinant of a bounded territory. In this way, traditional understandings of sovereignty in International Relations have taken the side of human exceptionalism within this paradox.

Moving beyond these traditional understandings, new sovereign governing practices have emerged that recognise and attempt to work within the entanglements and interconnections set out within social nature, so emphasising the other side of this paradox. These practices have drawn from the field of resilience studies that emphasise the essential complexity and adaptability of the environment and that also positioned the adaptive cycles of environmental systems in terms of a front and back loop. The front loop is characterised by generation, growth, conservation and stability. ⁷ The back loop on the other hand characterises the ecosystem’s phases of release and reorganisation, its times of collapse and creative destruction and renewal. ⁸ Drawing from this field, these new sovereign governing practices have incited a range of technologies and designs to mitigate and manage the effects of climate change. This includes ‘living’ resilience infrastructure ⁹ and experimental modes of governing that emphasise emergent causality and a real-time responsiveness and open-ended engagement with the world. ¹⁰ Such practices have been characterised as a form of governance that foregrounds immanent relationality.

While providing valuable insights into the new ways in which sovereign governing practices are adapting within the Anthropocene, this article argues that the explanatory power of these practices is limited to the back loop of environmental systems where politics is reorganised into unexpected combinations in order to respond to crises. These approaches do not address the changing way that sovereign governing practices can now relate to the growth and generation found within the front loop of environmental systems. In order to address this limitation and extend the interconnections within social nature precisely to this area, this article draws from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie ¹¹ puts forward a process-based ontology in which processes are more fundamental than things and indeed the existence of things is conditional upon the existence of processes. ¹² Schelling’s work, hitherto unexplored in the discipline of International Relations, analyses the world in terms of its most basic forces that are in a constant dynamic and productive process. In this way, it is the dynamic organisation of opposing forces via protons and electrons for example, within and between atoms that combine, interact, give rise to and link inorganic and organic matter as demonstrated in the carbon cycle. In this processual approach, all the products of social nature are not made up of fixed substances but are in a constant process of change driven by fundamental forces that exhibit dynamic stabilities relative to particular timescales.

By focusing on the oppositional forces that fundamentally run through and connect us to the natural world and drive the carbon cycle, the interconnections within social nature are extended to the front loop of environmental systems via the domain of physics. The productive power of these interconnections is demonstrated in terms of the continual generative processes that they give rise to and that link all things in the biosphere. This force-based approach binds human beings with the natural world whilst also underpinning the neo-Newtonian accounts of physics used in the Earth System Science that brings the Anthropocene into scientific understanding. ¹³ Answering the question above, the result is a conceptualisation of sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature. Such a conception is one way in which we can now understand the notion of sovereignty in the Anthropocene.

Understanding sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature highlights the productive and generative interconnections that run through the biosphere so integrating the fundamental growth and conservation found within the front loop of environmental systems. These sovereign generative effects include the development of particular understandings of human beings as complex organisms with reason and self-consciousness. This results in political thinking and theorising as it relates to the subject–object binaries within traditional conceptions of sovereignty and social nature itself. The front loop of environmental systems is now imbued with a foundational and dynamic productivity that allows humanity to consciously reunify with the natural world moving away from its selfish position as a self-creating cause. Understanding sovereignty in this manner also points to a way out of the paradox that the Anthropocene represents in that the forces of social nature are foundational but not ontologically prior to human action. The result is a significant contribution to investigations within International Relations that seek to integrate the processes within the natural world and demonstrate their significant influence upon international politics and its study.

This argument is developed in four sections. The first section analyses traditional notions of sovereignty in International Relations in terms of their theoretical and scientific basis and the subject–object binary distinctions they give rise to. The second section details the area of political thought focused on the interconnections that exist between human activity and the natural world in the formation of social nature. The new sovereign governing practices of resilience that are situated within social nature are investigated in terms of their focus on the back loop of environmental systems and the response to crises. The third section sets out Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in terms of the dialectically bifurcating forces that link us to the natural world, drive continual change and position it as in a continuous generative process. This approach is illustrated via the dynamic of opposing atomic forces that run through and construct matter and objects so challenging Newton’s conception of inert matter as foundational. A conception that significantly shaped traditional understandings of sovereignty. The final section further details the sovereign generative effects of the processes of social nature in terms of our ability to consciously reflect on our experience in the world. Our conscious reflection can give rise to alienating forms of political thought via subject–object binaries or reunite us with the natural world via the productive interconnections within social nature. This article concludes with the implications of this argument, and how it can offer us a way out of the paradox that the Anthropocene represents.

Traditional Sovereignty in International Relations

The capacity of the natural world to produce catastrophic risks and events within the Anthropocene poses a threat to the very existence of states and forces us to rethink traditional understandings of sovereignty in International Relations. These understandings have positioned the state as in complete total territorial control over its territory and separated human activity from an ‘inert’ natural world leaving it open to exploitation and control. This section will detail the theoretical and scientific basis of these traditional notions and the subject-object binary distinctions they give rise to.

Modern ideas of international law, society and order emphasise the notion of sovereignty in relation to states that assert supreme jurisdiction ‘in relation to a particular portion of the earth’s surface and a particular segment of the human population’. ¹⁴ Within this bounded territory and over this population, the state has ultimate sovereignty over all other authorities and the monopoly on the use of legitimate violence. In this way, sovereign power is one and indivisible within the political order. ¹⁵ States in turn respect one another’s claims to independence, non-interference and complete control over their internal workings. ¹⁶ Emerging out of the European colonisation of vast sections of the world ¹⁷ a generalised system developed in which sovereignty was positioned as an attribute of all (recognised) states that conferred principles such as the rule of non-intervention, equality of respect in basic rights and the right to domestic jurisdiction. ¹⁸

For Bartelson, sovereignty provides an ordering principle for what is internal to states and what is external to them. ¹⁹ It effectively demarcates and separates the domestic from the international sphere by defining the margins of a political community spatially as well as temporally. ²⁰ More than this, though, engaging with the work of Morgenthau, Aron, Bull and Waltz, Bartelson argues that sovereignty is the very source, original fact and organising principle of the modern international state system. ²¹ The belief in a bounded, Westphalian state identity, able to exert sovereignty over its defined territory, has also formed a key component of security in the now-antiquated Holocene epoch. ²²

This bounded understanding of the state system is framed against a background and particular conception of the natural world that has for so long been seen as a resource and domain for human mastery and exploitation, ²³ as demonstrated in the current customary international law principle of Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources. Such a view has a long history in the canon of political thought with ‘Nature’ or the natural world in Hobbes and Rousseau existing either as the ‘backdrop to the human drama, or as an ideal of purity to which humans should strive to emulate’. ²⁴ As in the Hobbesian conception, power and sovereignty is located within the body and territory of the state. ²⁵ The state as Leviathan, a metaphoric figure of the great human, divorced from the air it might breathe, ‘the living materiality of its territory, and the biosphere it depends upon for survival’ can only embody mastery over Nature. ²⁶ The result of this configuration is that state power is exercised over and against a biosphere and natural world that is rendered almost entirely invisible. ²⁷ Morgenthau, distinguishing political power from ‘man’s’ power over Nature, separates the two making the latter entirely dispensable. ²⁸

This classical conception of sovereignty, emphasising the bounded state with ultimate control over its territory, traverses both the mythical origins of international society and current international law. Its philosophical basis is situated in Kantian and Cartesian philosophical conceptions of ‘Man’ as separate from the biosphere. For Immanuel Kant, the natural world was distinct from the domain of the human. ²⁹ The ‘mechanism of nature (is) the direct opposite of freedom’ ³⁰ with thought taking its directive from within and not from any prompting by the external world. In this way, the freedom of the human will is unobligated to the domain of the natural world that is pre-disposed to our plans and must comply with our capacity to recognise regularity and order, and not the other way round. ³¹

Such subject-object binaries have been placed at the core of old-fashioned forms of modernism and materialism that emphasise autonomous subjectivities. ³² This approach radically separates humanity and the natural world generating a human-nature binary distinction that has been said to underpin the discipline of international state practice and International Relations. ³³ A fundamental separation results, leaving the natural world open to ‘legitimate’ exploitation and control by human beings and the state.

This understanding of territorially bounded and self-contained states has also been analysed in relation to its scientific basis. Wendt argues that the social sciences are derived from classical Newtonian physics and thus emphasize materialism, atomism, determinism, mechanism, absolute space and time and the subject-object distinction. ³⁴ Classical forms of thinking in International Relations have their foundations in a Newtonian account of physics that tells us that physical objects are individual, bounded, measurable and calculable. ³⁵ Moving along a linear plane of space-time, cause and effect can be understood and predicted in accordance with enough information on the object in question. The result is a billiard-ball model of the state and international system ³⁶ and a Newtonian-Kantian account that heavily influenced modern conceptions of sovereignty. ³⁷

These philosophical and scientific positions frame the state as the ultimate sovereign with complete territorial control over a bounded territory that separates man from the natural world and renders it inert and subject to ‘his’ control. As the next section will demonstrate, in contrast to these understandings of sovereignty, a range of thought has emerged emphasising the interconnections that exist between human activity and the natural world in the formation of a complex but singular ‘social nature’. Such conceptions incorporate the dynamic relation that exists between human activity and the natural world as demonstrated in the Anthropocene. This incorporation has given rise to new sovereign governing practices focused on resilience that integrate an active natural world within their processes in order to address the impacts of a changing climate.

Social Nature and New Governing Practices of Resilience in the Anthropocene

The movement into the Anthropocene era forces an ontological shift where human activity and the natural world are so bound together that they are existentially indistinguishable, forming a complex but singular ‘social nature’. ³⁸ This approach decentres both the state and the human. Emphasised are the complex spatio-temporal interdependencies, ‘indeterminant causes and the entangled nature of being between human and non-human entities’. ³⁹ Focusing on the interconnectivity of different organisms and the processes and cycles within the Earth system, such as carbon and water, helps overcome the binary distinction between humans and the natural world ⁴⁰ that, as detailed above, are a key component of traditional notions of sovereignty. The complex, interlinked set of exchanges within these cycles and between various parts of the Earth system incorporates humans, non-humans and things within an active network.

These interconnections have been driven and solidified by the consequences and impact of the Anthropocene. Indeed,

. . .the very concept of the Anthropocene – that human activity is fundamentally altering the geological composition of the planet – would seem to undermine any such contention that the human and the non-human are ontologically separable. ⁴¹

The Anthropocene as an ‘interconnected, complex, holistic, and relational world’ ⁴² significantly problematises the binaries of modernity. These binaries have blocked our sensitivity to the natural world as a process and our relationality and co-dependence on humans and non-humans alike. ⁴³ Furthermore, if the Anthropocene is a result of our impinging upon Earth systems and strata, then this agency should itself be seen as an expression of planetary properties, processes and potentialities. ⁴⁴ In other words, ‘We are walking, talking minerals’. ⁴⁵

In line with this, the human subject can itself be considered as functioning within and being comprised of ecologies. ⁴⁶ Gut microbiota within our digestive tracts is essential to many basic vital human functions both physical and psychological. ⁴⁷ Fundamental dimensions of what are considered normal and abnormal human subjective functions are not linked to a central pole of consciousness, but ecological systems constituted by other organisms which are essential to the constitution of human subjectivity. ⁴⁸ Such insights force us to consider the constitution of the subject qua ecology as deeply relational, integrated and impure. ⁴⁹

The interconnections and histories of co-evolution have then significant ontological implications in that the natural world can no longer be understood to be separate, outside or external to human beings. The Earth has been positioned as the very ground and condition of human thought and action, of our encountering of everything else. ⁵⁰ The local and planetary biosphere is the essential support system on which all other human enterprises depend. ⁵¹ Humans are no longer removed from and above the natural world, able to govern, control and direct it. This problematises the culture-nature divide ⁵² and signals the rise of an interconnected social nature. Moving beyond the modernist binary, ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ are no longer separable and human agency is now redefined as part of the natural world itself. ⁵³ Viewing the natural world as lively in its excess and creativity represents an opportunity to naturalise politics.

In this vein, the excess and creativity of the natural world also has serious political implications. The Anthropocene and the interconnections and entanglements that it reveals stimulates significant rethinking around some of the core atomistic theories within International Relations. ⁵⁴ This includes the relationship between ‘the international system of states based on sovereignty and non-interference, and the natural world’. ⁵⁵ The state-centric world of International Relation’s which sees the biosphere as mere material in wait of profit, ignores our interactions with it ⁵⁶ and is unable to account for fundamental discontinuity in the international system. ⁵⁷ Serious questions are also raised for forms of liberal politics that emphasise supremacist views of human agency against a largely passive and frail natural world. ⁵⁸ To speak of the wilful sovereign state that can make ultimate decisions in the context of the Anthropocene and an increasingly violent climate would seem to be more and more misguided. ⁵⁹

In contrast to modern accounts of sovereignty, such interconnections also highlight the way that political systems have emerged out of past world-historical stages that existed in Nature and were subject to it. ⁶⁰ The perception of the natural world as a powerful force shaping human political institutions represents an extremely old idea. ⁶¹ This includes key physiopolitical themes such as the impact of climate on the rise and spread of empires ⁶² that root political institutions in and subjects them to blind environmental forces. ⁶³ Only with the advent of European civilisation and its dissemination via colonial conquest were humans positioned as sovereign agents of the biosphere. ⁶⁴ The modern political binary separating ‘man’ from Nature emerged out of a situation in which human activity was vitally embedded within it and very much subject to it. As Agamben notes, within binaries there is no pure inside or outside, the line separating the two represents a ‘constitutive threshold, on which the outside is included in its exclusion’. ⁶⁵

Underlying climate change is an awareness of how our release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere impacts on a much wider natural process through which carbon shifts and changes its compound state and impacts other atmospheric processes via feedback. Understanding the implications of the (uneven) capacity of our species to take significant action as part of and within Earth processes is now a key political concern. ⁶⁶ Our action within these processes is now inciting violent and extreme weather events including sea level rise that will redraw its boundaries overcoming state power and determination. ⁶⁷ Such an awareness not only problematises traditional notions of sovereignty but it has also forced a rethinking of how governing practices should be reformulated in this context. In response, mitigation efforts ⁶⁸ have instigated a range of new sovereign governing practices focused on resilience. These new practices take as their point of departure a recognition of the non-linear processes, complexities and entanglements within social nature and the Anthropocene as detailed in this section.

New Sovereign Governing Practices of Resilience

In light of the interconnections within social nature and the environmental displacements of the Anthropocene, new governing practices focused on resilience have emerged in the hope of mitigating and managing the complex effects and interconnected processes of climate change. As a new governance paradigm, resilience resonates well with the uncertainties and complexities of the Anthropocene ⁶⁹ that exceed the sovereign individual’s cognitive capacities. ⁷⁰ The field of resilience utilises complex adaptive systems and cybernetics to emphasise the essential complexity and adaptability of the environment. As detailed in the introduction, this field also positioned the adaptive cycles of environmental systems in terms of a front and back loop. The front loop is characterised by generation, growth, conservation and stability. ⁷¹ The back loop on the other hand characterises the ecosystem’s phases of release and reorganisation, its times of collapse and creative destruction and renewal. ⁷²

The Anthropocene’s destabilisation of liberal modernity demonstrates its impact on the back loop of environmental systems. The possibility and potential within this destabilisation has been grasped by resilience thinkers to generate a range of new governing practices to address the complexity, uncertainty and opportunity that has been generated by the Anthropocene. ⁷³ This approach has become the dominant response to governing in the Anthropocene back loop with resilience management rising to the top of governmental agendas from the United Nations to city governments and activists. Such governing practices often set out to create and define ‘safe operating spaces’ able to absorb and manage, rather than eliminate the disturbance itself by addressing root cause. ⁷⁴

Efforts include the 100 Resilient Cities programme, funded with a $100m investment by the Rockefeller Foundation, that has set up a Chief Resilience Officer in 81 cities worldwide. The Stockholm Resilience Centre and cities such as New York and Miami seek to generate a safe operating space to combat rising sea levels. These cities represent ‘first responder’ laboratories for resiliency infrastructures and strategies for climate change. Plans produced include industrial pumps, elevating streets, new seawalls and ‘living infrastructure’ made up of two miles of artificial oyster reefs that can buffer future storm surge and remediate polluted water. ⁷⁵ This living infrastructure harnesses the natural functioning of oysters to grow together to produce reefs that will rise in parallel with future sea levels. ⁷⁶

Importantly, these efforts, while recognising deep-seated problems, focus on attenuating and governing disruption in order to maintain the identity of the system. ⁷⁷ The emphasis is on navigating and safely passing through tough times by preparing for and enduring crises so as to stay afloat, bounce back or pass through. Part of this response is an attitude towards experimentation, which embraces the period of uncertainty and uses it as an opportunity to test out new management responses. ⁷⁸ In this experimental vein, the Anthropocene has been investigated as a contextual framing both for new forms of governing and for new conceptual frameworks negotiating and constructing what it means to govern. ⁷⁹ Three distinct modes of governance emerge: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. Each mode provides a distinct conceptualisation of governance in a world framed as complex, entangled and unpredictable.

Mapping, as a mode of governance, is distinctive in that it focuses on tracing the emergence of non-linear processes and interactions. ⁸⁰ Seeking to see more intensively ‘from the inside’ of problems, to understand them on their own terms. Sensing works on the surface, on the ‘actualist’ notion that ‘only the actual is real’. The result is a ‘real time’ responsive form of management that increasingly focuses on the ‘what is’ of the world in its complex and plural emergence. ⁸¹ Hacking represents an iterative, gradual approach to policy interventions, where each hack ‘uses and constructs new inter-relationships creating new possibilities for thinking and acting’. ⁸² This approach supports the powers and linkages that enable the process of becoming and lead to transformation. ⁸³

These new sovereign governing practices have been conceptualised as representing a subtle but important shift in that governance now strives to become calibrated in relation to a form of life embedded within the world. ⁸⁴ This onto-epistemological shift seeks to ‘make governance cybernetically responsive to a complex and emergent environment that exceeds modern control’. ⁸⁵ As demonstrated in the examples above, governance is now focused on regulating and gaining control over the productive powers of life itself by ‘facilitating’, ‘enabling’ or ‘engendering’ life’s excessive potential to come to the surface, to circulate or emerge. Within this it seeks the sources of security within the threatened object itself, focusing attention inward, to life’s systemic capacities for self-organised adaptation to external shocks. ⁸⁶ The ‘environmental’ qualities of resilience operate through the problematisation and instrumentalisation of ecological relations ⁸⁷ that are now enhanced by algorithmic computation and distributive sensory capacities ⁸⁸ while remaining focused on the maintenance of existing neoliberal economic, social and political relations.

Within such governing practices, human and non-human entities are rendered equivalent, interlinked, interchangeable and related in terms of feedback and communication. Politics is now suborned to the governance of effects rather than causes ⁸⁹ and it is further reduced to ‘immanent forms of eco-cybernetic control and connection’. ⁹⁰ Immanence is proposed as a political salvation wherein human subjectivity becomes a point of pure passage or transmitting node ⁹¹ in the entanglements of social nature.

The sovereign governing practices of resilience identified above integrate an awareness of the complex interaction between social nature and our political efforts to address the Anthropocene within it. Yet, in remaining focused on immanent relationality within the political practices they analyse, their explanatory power is limited to the back loop of environmental systems where novel governing practices reflect a reorganisation of politics into unexpected combinations in order to respond to crises. While providing valuable insights into the new ways in which governing practices are adapting within the Anthropocene, these analyses do not address the changing way that sovereign governing practices now relate to the generation, growth and conservation found within the front loop of environmental systems.

In order to address this, the next section will draw from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and the process ontology set out within it. Schelling’s thought details the processual dynamic of fundamental forces that constitute and connect all things within the natural world. This is illustrated via the domain of physics and the forces that constitute atoms. The result is an elucidation of the generative role that these forces play in continuously driving the front loop of environmental systems that in turn have given rise to human consciousness and our political determinations. Via the domain of physics and the fundamental and processual atomic forces that shape all physical objects, the dynamic interactions within social nature are extended to the generative front loop of the biosphere. The extension of these dynamic processes not only reveals their sovereign generative power, but it also allows humanity to consciously reunify with the natural world. The result is a reconfiguration of sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature.

The Naturphilosophie

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, a post-Kantian German idealist philosopher, was part of the philosophical effort to resolve the dualisms that arose from Kant’s thought, the subject-object division prime amongst them. ⁹² Schelling’s philosophical approach has been characterised as a significant modern attempt to address the entirety of the Earth system or ‘All’. ⁹³ The Naturphilosophie is Schelling’s attempt to bring unity to philosophy ⁹⁴ and encompass within a single set of philosophical principles the production of the natural world and thought, of thought out of and as part of the natural world. ⁹⁵ Schelling bases his account in the forces that can be traced through all of natural organisation, that also shapes human consciousness and through which they become manifest as concept. ⁹⁶ The natural world is a priori, with all things consequent upon its activity, including living organisms that represent a higher power and more complex organisation of the inorganic. ⁹⁷ Such an account has similarities with the Gaia hypothesis developed centuries later. ⁹⁸

Iain Hamilton Grant, drawing from Schelling, has argued that previous efforts to understand our relationship with the natural world have focused predominantly on animality. As a result, they have failed to give adequate attention to the ‘unstable ground – the “brute matter” from which life emerges’. ⁹⁹ The forces within the natural world need to be understood in all their ‘subhuman and superhuman resonances: as the inhuman that makes the human possible’. ¹⁰⁰ As the Earth ‘is the very condition of our encountering of everything else’ ¹⁰¹ we should then place things in the centre and us at the periphery ¹⁰² and acknowledge our receptivity to a universe of colourful directives that come from without and that nourish us with its flows. ¹⁰³

Schelling too, critiqued the thought of his time, declaring that modern European philosophy, since its inception with Descartes, had a significant oversight in that ‘nature is not present to it and that it lacks nature’s living ground’. ¹⁰⁴ The Naturphilosophie addresses this omission by synthesising the conclusions that were leading the scientific field in his time including new discoveries in physics regarding magnetism and electricity. Indeed, Schelling’s work in the Naturphilosophie, on the productivity of the natural world, was influential in the formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy and the discovery of ultra-violet light and electro-magnetism. ¹⁰⁵

The result is a decomposition of the natural world into its fundamental forces that reveal, most importantly, the origins and conditions of natural organisation. ¹⁰⁶ This approach argues that in contrast to Newtonian conceptions of matter and objects as inert, dialectically bifurcating forces make up matter and are more fundamental. These forces not only make possible the development of matter but also generate the organic realm out of which human beings with their distinctive cognitive capacities and political dualisms arise. In Schelling’s account, human intelligence and freedom cannot be regarded as something separate from social nature and the natural world, as different in kind from it but instead is a product of it. ¹⁰⁷

As will be shown in the following section, by focusing on the oppositional forces that fundamentally run through and connect us to the natural world and drive the carbon cycle, the interconnections within social nature are extended via the domain of physics. The productive power of these interconnections is demonstrated in terms of the continual generative processes that they give rise to and that link all things in the biosphere. These productive and generative interconnections allow us to integrate the fundamental growth and conservation found within the front loop of environmental systems into this conception of sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature.

Forces, Power and Process in the Naturphilosophie

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is a philosophy of process in which the objects of the entire natural world, both inorganic and organic, arise through the interaction of the same basic forces that constrict and limit each other. ¹⁰⁸ The Naturphilosophie posits the natural world or Nature as both a productive system and an object of investigation, both productive and product. ¹⁰⁹ In doing so, it attempts to ‘explain everything by the forces of Nature’. ¹¹⁰ In this way, Schelling ventures to root all the products of the natural world within its own workings and systems. Foremost amongst these is the dynamic interplay of forces or natural powers. ‘Force is the ultimate’. ¹¹¹ Forces or natural powers are something that all our physical explanations should return to if the workings of social nature are to be adequately understood. A central element in our understanding of force(s) is that they are not finite ‘except insofar as it is limited by one opposing it’. ¹¹² Therefore, to think of a force we must also presume a force opposed to it.

Matter and objects are engendered through the dynamic interplay of essential forces in the material world. ‘“Forces” are the empirical manifestation of Nature’s “productivity” or activity, and all matter, organic or inorganic, is composed of a play of forces both free and constrained’. ¹¹³ As Alderwick notes, in the Naturphilosophie, reality, at the fundamental level, is composed of forces or natural powers that are both real and non-reducible and that produce the concrete objects which are experienced in our day-to-day interactions with the natural world. ¹¹⁴ Taking this position, if there were only one force and nothing to counteract it, then it would become infinite and dominate to an infinite extent. ¹¹⁵ As ‘real antithesis is possible only between things of one kind and common origin’, ¹¹⁶ forces, to have meaningful effect must be linked and opposed. Using the example of light energy, if this originally

. . .positive force were infinite, it would lie entirely beyond the limits of all possible perception. Restricted by the opposing force, it becomes a finite magnitude – it begins to be an object of perception, or manifests itself in phenomena. ¹¹⁷

Our experience of the world then depends upon both the immediate positive force, such as light, and its restriction by the negative or opposing force as occurs when light hits matter, so restricting it and making objects visible and intelligible. The dynamic interplay of forces provides the foundation for our experience.

Although all the multiplicity of the natural world emerges from the restriction of finite force by finite force, forces are not themselves phenomena but are concealed within them. For Schelling, the ‘phenomena of every force is therefore a matter’. ¹¹⁸ In this way, force, matter and objects exist ontologically on the same plane of reality and materiality, and this relation is important in addressing the paradox of the Anthropocene set out in the conclusion. Further, not only do matter and forces coexist, but there is also no difference in kind between them or appearance and production. ¹¹⁹ Dialectically bifurcating forces demonstrate a dynamic of productive limitation that drives the continual change in the material world and that positions it as in a continuous process.

This approach, explaining the infinite productivity of the natural world through the dynamic bifurcation of forces, unifies the organic and inorganic. ¹²⁰ It also re-orientates the Naturphilosophie away from explaining the active processes driving change. Instead, if all matter is made up of dynamic forces, the question now becomes how to explain the resting or permanent. ¹²¹ Crucially, within this position, permanency arises from the limitation that certain forces place upon others within the natural world and that make up its own activity over a particular period of time. As thinkers that have applied this approach to biology and physics have argued, all life is in a constant process of change driven by these forces that exhibit dynamic stabilities relative to particular timescales. ¹²² The points of limitation are signified by the products and objects of Nature, ¹²³ including those that make up the plant and animal kingdom.

Driven by opposite and bifurcating forces, the natural world develops in a continual and processual way. ¹²⁴ The products of social nature represent for a particular period of time a constitutive limitation on these forces that find a degree of equilibrium. The equilibrium of forces gives matter a sense of rest and permanency. ¹²⁵ Forces and the matter they constitute represent a mix of homogenous and heterogeneous interactions. Opposing forces possess a

. . .necessary striving to equilibriate, that is, to set themselves into a relation of minimal reciprocity; consequently, were the forces not unequally distributed throughout the universe, or were the equilibrium not constantly destroyed, all partial motion would ultimately vanish [. . .] and the entire world sink into inactivity. ¹²⁶

These products and the limitation of forces within them are under constant pressure to shift, change and evolve within the wider natural world perceived as absolutely active. ¹²⁷ In this way, the products and objects within social nature are caught within a permanent process, for the natural world does not tolerate any ‘final product, nothing permanent, fixed once and for all’. ¹²⁸ The carbon cycle is a good example of this. In one part of this process, carbon moves from compound to compound via photosynthesis and cellular respiration to provide the fuel for the metabolism of all living things. ¹²⁹ All life is in a constant process of change that even in death contributes to the nourishment of other living beings. All organic and inorganic objects form part of a virtuous cycle that sustains itself. From this perspective, human beings are not the controllers of an inert and docile natural world but vitally embedded within it and wholly dependent upon its products and processes. Our action as part of and within the carbon cycle has further intensified the products of this process.

The development of scientific knowledge since Schelling’s time has remarkably affirmed his work on the fundamental forces that constitute matter. This can be seen in our understanding of atoms and radioactivity. Atoms represent the smallest constituents and basic building blocks of all organic and inorganic elements. They are made up of three components: protons, electrons and neutrons. Positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons exist innately as forces. In a stable or neutral atom, the number of protons equals the number of electrons and a combination of forces hold the atom together. In this way an equilibrium between opposing forces has been reached, forming a stable element, such as iron. The positively charged protons in the nucleus will attract the negatively charged electrons via the electro(magnetic) force. This explains how the electrons are bound to the nucleus of an atom. Another force – the strong nuclear force or interaction – holds the protons together in the nucleus, overcoming the electro(magnetic) repulsion that would otherwise push the protons apart. Together these forces give matter and objects the characteristics which are experienced in our daily lives including their extension in space via their given shape and the properties of friction and elasticity. ¹³⁰

In contrast to the strong nuclear interaction, in a weak nuclear interaction, unstable atoms often have too many protons or neutrons. In this case, the equilibrium of stable atoms has been breached and the strong nuclear and electro(magnetic) forces holding the particles together is broken. In response, excess protons or neutrons are emitted in a process of radioactive decay that creates new elements. ¹³¹ This process of radioactive decay, also known as a half-life, allows us to determine the age of fossils via carbon dating and it has been harnessed in nuclear reactors that often use Uranium-235 to conduct nuclear fission and generate electricity. As this element decays, it releases two neutrons and two protons inducing an intense heated reaction when situated in close proximity to thousands of other Uranium-235 rods. All elements in the universe contain atoms constructed by opposing forces in particular configurations that range from extremely stable to highly radioactive, from strong equilibrium to extremely weak. Electro(magnetism) along with weak and strong nuclear interactions and gravity represent the four fundamental forces that run through the universe. ¹³²

This example demonstrates clearly the dynamic equilibrium that fundamental forces exhibit in the formation of intelligible objects that, importantly, exist relative to particular timescales. Schelling’s work on the dynamic interplay of forces that make up the natural and organic world has significant implications for Newtonian accounts of matter that, as detailed above, seriously shaped traditional understandings of sovereignty in International Relations.

Forces and Matter

Traditional understandings of sovereignty in International Relations drew from a Newtonian scientific basis to put forward a bounded state in which territorial control was ultimate and the natural world was a separate region reserved for human domination. Newtonian accounts of matter and objects picture them as static, inert and requiring some external power to confer properties and explain their causal activity. ¹³³ For Newton, forces are not innate in matter ¹³⁴ and indeed matter comes first, and forces affect matter and objects afterwards.

Schelling’s account challenges Newton’s conception of matter as inert by illustrating the constitutive dynamic of opposing forces that run through and construct matter and objects. Atoms make up all matter yet, atoms exist via the configuration of opposing and dynamic forces that electrons and protons represent. In this way, a dynamic of opposed forces runs through all matter and objects. From this perspective, Schelling is correct in that forces are more fundamental than matter and so force should instead be its ground. This approach reveals our connection with the natural world and its power within social nature. This power, manifest in the carbon cycle, shapes the climate. Such an approach does not invalidate Newton’s laws of motion but reverses the hierarchy according to which matter exists, is organised and through which it changes.

For Newtonians, matter is of prime concern as it fills up and occupies space. Schelling’s response to this is to highlight the fact that matter is able to fill up space by virtue of it being inherently active and able to exert a force. ¹³⁵ For matter to be intelligible as a determinate quantity, it has then the power to fill space and be in tension with an alternate power that limits it. ¹³⁶ Opposing forces then, such as the repulsion and attraction created by configurations of protons and electrons, run through all matter and objects and constitute its properties. ¹³⁷ Matter and objects are therefore fundamentally shaped by opposing forces that provide for the dynamic organisation of the world around us, ¹³⁸ including in the carbon cycle. Such an account adds depth and nuance to the relational viewpoint that position ‘things’ as best characterised as processual unfoldings of relationalities in a world where relationality is ontologically primary. ¹³⁹

The emergence and development of organic from inorganic matter is explained by Schelling in terms of the fundamental forces that run through it. The process through which matter arises also supports the emergence of varying phenomena with increasing degrees of complexity. This includes electricity, chemical systems, magnetism and so on, up through the levels of inorganic matter until the organism is produced. This process of forces repeats at the level of living creatures, giving rise to more and more complex organisms until reason and self-consciousness emerge at the level of the human subject. ¹⁴⁰ Crucially, in contrast to the Kantian view discussed above, living organisms and inorganic matter are not separate but fundamentally connected. Every material is ‘nothing other than a determinate degree of action’ ¹⁴¹ shaped by fundamental antagonistic forces. Living organisms are separated only in terms of the combination and concentration of the forces which constitute them and that are the components of social nature’s single active and productive system. ¹⁴² The human body is predominantly made up of a particular configuration and combination of the forces of protons and electrons that constitute the atoms of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus.

This section has detailed the way that, drawing from the Naturphilosophie, the interconnections within social nature can be extended via the domain of physics to incorporate the growth and conservation found within the front loop of environmental systems. The oppositional forces that fundamentally run through the natural world constitute matter and also connect us to and drive the life-giving properties and generative effects of the carbon cycle. These sovereign generative effects include the development of human beings as complex organisms with reason and self-consciousness. As we will see in the following section, these productive processes not only fundamentally situate human activity as a product of Nature, but they also give rise to human thinking and reflection that facilitates our understanding of the natural world as a distinct object of knowledge. These productive and generative processes underpin certain forms of political thinking discussed in this article.

The Naturphilosophie and Political Thought

So far, this article has demonstrated the way that Schelling’s Naturphilosophie extends the interconnections within social nature via the domain of physics to incorporate the front loop of environmental systems so demonstrating the fundamental generative productivity and sovereign power within them. This section will now illustrate in greater detail one dimension of this generative and productive activity as it relates to the particular forms of political thinking and theorising detailed above in relation to subject-object binaries and social nature itself.

One of the key concerns for Schelling was to understand how consciousness emerges as a product of the processes identified above. As detailed, in contrast to Kant, Schelling refused to see the thinking subject as opposed to the natural world but instead understood it as a part of it. The natural world is independently productive and is infused with an unconscious productive activity that is the source of this form of freedom. ¹⁴³ Human beings represent the highest manifestation of this form of freedom in Nature understood as conscious productivity. ¹⁴⁴ This conscious productivity is the result of our ability to reflect on our experience. Via reflection, human beings are able to set themselves in opposition to and understand themselves as different from each other and the external world. The natural world and human beings can be understood as distinct objects of knowledge and investigated through conscious reflection. ¹⁴⁵ Our knowledge of the world and ourselves, derived from our own creative thinking and activity, is situated as an element in Nature’s productivity. In this way and as detailed above, the dynamic and sovereign productive activity of social nature is not separate from the objects and products within it but is also at work within these objects. ¹⁴⁶

For Schelling, we are co-producers of the knowledge of objects that is gained via our practical interaction and questioning of the natural world. ¹⁴⁷ Our initial hypotheses are challenged, refined and confirmed through these interactions. In other words, only in becoming acquainted with the principles of an object’s possibility can we claim to know it. Such efforts reveal and demand an engagement with the productive activity of the natural world that is a priori to any conscious understanding of it. In this way, the biosphere is the ‘precondition for reflection and subjectivity, rather than a characteristic or result of’ these factors. ¹⁴⁸ As Nature is temporally prior, subjectivity itself, acquires the form of an intrinsically altered Nature. ¹⁴⁹ Every process of knowing and being is then necessarily a collective process involving human and other-than-human participation. ¹⁵⁰ For example, the physical principles of the natural world such as gravity are always at work in our activity whether we characterise them correctly or not.

The unconscious productivity of the natural world gives rise then to forms of conscious productivity within a thinking subject. Living organisms represent an original combination of conscious and unconscious productivity. ¹⁵¹ The natural world begins unconsciously and produces a particular form of consciousness that is found within human beings. A form of consciousness that recognises human activity as distinct from the natural world and able to hold it as an object of knowledge, investigation and intervention.

For Schelling, consciousness represents a form of freedom. This freedom is unconstrained by, yet a product of, the dynamic forces and processes that run through the natural world. In this way, human consciousness and productivity is grounded in and simultaneously different from the contingent atomic forces that shape the natural world. A ‘free Subject has to have a Ground which is not himself’. ¹⁵² This relationship also gives rise to the insight that these forms of human consciousness and freedom, are not simply ‘ours’. Our self-consciousness is always-already ‘decentred’, as a product of the unconscious productivity of the dynamic forces of the natural world through which it becomes aware of itself. ¹⁵³ In turn, we are unable to properly comprehend the magnitude and full complexity of the dynamic processes of the biosphere that can often appear as a foreign, hostile and superior power indifferent to our plight. ¹⁵⁴

This relationship also reveals that the natural world can only attain its self-identity ‘at the price of radical decentrement: it can find itself only in a medium outside itself’. ¹⁵⁵ For Žižek, this link and split, our fundamental basis in the forces of the natural world that allows us to conceive of it as an object of knowledge ready for our disposal, is responsible for the ecological crisis that the Anthropocene represents. ¹⁵⁶ This conscious freedom causes a split with the natural world that has resulted in our alienation from it. ¹⁵⁷ Philosophy, political thinking and natural science has for the most part cemented this separation between subject and object that has contributed to humanity’s ever deeper alienation from Nature and hence also from itself. ¹⁵⁸ Our conscious freedom has made manifest the possibilities for forms of political thinking that emphasise subject-object distinctions as demonstrated within the traditional notions of sovereignty detailed above.

Schelling’s notion of freedom as conscious productive activity is then built upon and has its origins in the foundation of unconscious productive activity that runs through the natural world. ¹⁵⁹ As detailed above, this reflection can lead to different forms of political thinking and theorising including to the subject-object binaries that obscure the original unity from which human thought and activity arises. The spontaneity of conscious reflection allows humanity to be considered free and distinct from the natural world. Through this freedom we are able to take ourselves at once as both subject and object and take our place as a unique entity in Nature. ¹⁶⁰ The dynamic and productive forces in the biosphere provide the ground for human consciousness, reflection and forms of political thought that alienates and obscures this very productivity in the generation of certain paradoxes noted in the introduction.

For Schelling though, our alienation in relation to the natural world via a form of thinking that produces it as pure object, that obscures Nature’s productivity as our ground, is something that should be overcome. Our rupture with the biosphere is an unsatisfactory one, but nevertheless it can be seen as a necessary step towards reaching the higher state of a conscious reunion. ¹⁶¹ If the productive processes of the natural world give human beings the freedom for political thought that alienates ourselves from our very ground, it is also in this freedom that we find the opportunity for a re-unification. Our ability to recognise the unconscious productivity of Nature in one’s conscious activity as a human being, ¹⁶² allows for this re-unification. Understanding sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature not only recognises this situatedness of political thought but also draws from it, making it explicit and so opening up the space for further forms of political thinking and action that treat the natural world as vital to our very being.

Freedom, via political thought, allows us to recognise the subject-object distinction separating us from the natural world and in doing so it gives us the opportunity to abolish this separation forever. ¹⁶³ This abolition is a conscious restoration of Nature with its products within a universal theory of wholeness. While initially it may appear to be humanity that writes and makes meaningful distinctions regarding the workings of the world around us, it is the infinite activity and unity within Nature itself that makes these processes possible in the first place. ¹⁶⁴ As detailed above, this activity is driven forward by eternally creating elemental atomic forces. As a result, the front loop of environmental systems is now imbued with a foundational and dynamic productivity that reframes humanity’s selfish positioning of itself as a self-creating cause. ¹⁶⁵ This reframing acts as a conscious re-unification that for Schelling is a higher state of unity through freedom and political thought. Our political thought on key ideas such as sovereignty, free to integrate the dynamic productivity of the front loop of environmental systems, leads to its reformulation in terms of the processes of social nature.

Overall, Schelling offers up a way of understanding how rationality and freedom are inherent in the natural world such that they emerge in their particular explicit manifestations in human beings. ¹⁶⁶ The Naturphilosophie positions human beings as products of Nature that participate in its ever-becoming productivity. Human conscious productivity is a unique extension of the unconscious productivity that runs through the biosphere. ¹⁶⁷ Human consciousness and the forms of political theorising it gives rise to, including the subject-object distinctions at the core of traditional conceptions of sovereignty, are the result of the generative power of the dynamic processes within this sphere. These generative and dynamic processes also provide the basis for other forms of political thought that can recognise the integrated relation between human activity and the natural world in the formation of an extended and sovereign social nature.

Conclusion

How can we understand sovereignty in the Anthropocene? The new climatic regime that the Anthropocene represents calls into question traditional understandings of sovereignty that give states ultimate territorial control over an inert natural world within a bounded territory. Work within the area of social nature has set out to problematise our separation from the natural world ontologically and politically and demonstrate our vital and fundamental connections to it. These connections have been applied in governing practices that seek to engender resilience in the face of a more extreme and violent climate. This article has argued that such efforts act solely within the back loop of environmental systems that set out to ensure the reorganisation and continuation of the current political system in the face of extreme climatic challenges.

Drawing from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and its processual account of bifurcating forces, the interconnections within social nature were extended via the domain of physics to incorporate the front loop of environmental systems. The productive power of these interconnections was demonstrated in terms of the continual generative processes that they give rise to and that link all things in the biosphere. This dynamic and generative activity is at work in the unconscious productivity of the natural world that gives rise to the conscious productivity of a thinking subject, its subject-object distinctions and the conception of social nature itself. Freedom, via political thought, allows us to consciously reunify humanity with Nature via the recognition of the foundational and dynamic productivity within the front loop of environmental systems. Understanding sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature grounds human activity in the dynamic interactions that run through the biosphere and that have made possible our climate changing activities in the Anthropocene.

As detailed in the Introduction, the Anthropocene represents a paradox in that the exceptionalism of human intervention into the processes of social nature in the creation of climate change is difficult to sustain against the backdrop of human agency that is precisely derived from these processes. It is here that Schelling may offer us a way out of this paradox. For Schelling, to think ontologically in terms of forces that run through the natural world does not imply that all objects and phenomena are reduced to these forces. ¹⁶⁸ As detailed above, there is a reciprocal relationship between the forces of social nature and the objects they give rise to. The infinite productivity of dynamic forces that run through social nature can only be expressed in something that they are not – a finite product or object. ¹⁶⁹ The dialectical negativity internal to the forces of the natural world is what enables its dynamism and productivity. ¹⁷⁰ Recall that the example of light and its restriction by matter was used above to demonstrate the role that oppositions to forces play in their actualisation and intelligibility.

As the actualisation of the forces of social nature depends on their inhibition and manifestation in objects, the ontological relationship of dependence between forces and objects is reciprocal with the result that neither can be reduced to the other. ¹⁷¹ Even though forces may be prior to objects in facilitating their production, they are not ontologically prior as forces must be manifest in objects in order to be actualised. The result is that while human activity both draws from and intervenes in the processes of social nature, this activity cannot be reduced to the forces that run through it as we represent their very limitation, form and actualisation. The forces of social nature are foundational but not ontologically prior to human action.

For Schelling, our alienation in relation to the natural world via a form of thinking that produces it as pure object, that obscures Nature’s productivity as our ground, is something that should be overcome. With regard to our current ecological problems Schelling’s work can be understood as a ‘warning not to selfishly cut oneself off from the unconscious productivity of nature in one’s conscious activity as a human being, if one wishes to prevent one’s own destruction’. ¹⁷² Our rupture with the biosphere is an unsatisfactory one, but nevertheless it can be seen as a necessary step towards reaching the higher state of a conscious reunion. As stated above, if the productive processes of the natural world give human beings the political freedom to alienate ourselves from our very ground, it is also in this freedom that we find the potential opportunity for possible re-unification. If humanity is to find an adequate place in the natural world it will at least have its basis in the awareness that our efforts in political thinking as a solution owes its freedom and possibilities to the very processes and productivity that run through it. ¹⁷³ Understanding sovereignty in terms of the processes of social nature may be one step in the search for this place.