Natural Anarchy

Most things are FAKE.

In this second installment of our ‘Cudenec Primer’, we present the first chapter from Paul’s Nature, Essence & Anarchy, originally published in 2016.

An important theme of this current essay is that a spiritual vision represents a clear vision of the world as it actually is! Capitalism, modern sham-philosophies and reductive sciences systematically distort how we see and experience the world around us and of which we are a part.

To get clear of the obfuscations that surround us, Cudenec argues, we need to recapture the powers of seeing the world objectively and imaginatively. Yes, these go together!

-WD James (ed.)

“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation”.1

It is a world where “the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making”,2 a world of “the superficial reign of images”.3 Its version of the past is as fake as its vision of the future, its democracy as much a manipulative illusion as the constant threats conjured up by its propaganda to keep us in our place. Its very idea of normality is fake: its alienated individuals; its weekly rhythms of paid labour and consumption; its imposed concepts of land “ownership”, “legitimate authority”, “nationality”.

Moreover, this capitalist world reduces everything to its own shallow terms, cannot admit that there is anything beyond the four thin walls of its own empty, sterile, valueless universe. There can be no meaning in the world, because meaning has no place in its thinking. There can be no authenticity, because the very existence of that term would throw into sharp relief its own fundamental inauthenticity. For the constructed capitalist world, everything else has also been constructed. Aware on some level of its own fundamental falsity, it defends itself by projecting that falsity on to everything else that exists, in order to level the playing field and create a theoretical realm in which its own artifice no longer stands out as aberrant, alien, toxic. It becomes impossible to accuse capitalism, in particular, of being fake if you accept its big lie that everything, in general, is fake, and that there is no such thing as truth, meaning, origin, essence and nature.

Guy Debord

But what if we reject that lie? What if we dare to look beyond the material and philosophical artifice with which have been surrounded since birth and search for something real on which to base our understanding? Here we will have stepped beyond the perimeter fence of the possibilities as dictated to us by the dominant system of all-embracing mendacity. We will be wandering in forests of thought that are not marked on the street-maps of modernity, encountering outlaws and thought-criminals regarded as dangerous by our mind-masters, taking paths that lead us far beyond the limits of the world as laid out for us by their systems of domination.

The very first reality we encounter, on emerging from the capitalist world of falsity, is that we, as human beings, are in fact part of nature. This is a truth that has been denied to us, in the West, for centuries – initially by the religious form previously taken by the tyranny that still stifles us today.4 “Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle”,5 writes Debord and by reclaiming that primal sense of belonging to our world we shatter that separation, free ourselves from the mirrored cage of self-referential human intellectuality.

Our understanding begins with the knowledge of what we are in our flesh, by breathing and feeling the raw actuality of our own physical presence. As John Zerzan sets out in Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization:

“This is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of separateness from the Earth grows and we are meant to forget our animality. But we are animals and we co-evolved, like all animals, in rapport with other bodily forms and aspects of the world”.6

For all the layers of self-deception we have built up around us, we cannot alter the fact that “we are still animals on the planet, with all its original messages waiting in our being”.7 If we are to ever forge a new future completely free of the alienating lies of the industrial capitalist spectacle, we will need to find roots for our thinking that predate our contemporary separation. Ancient wisdom, folk culture, myth and lore can all feed into our understanding of who and what we are, so that we can fashion a sense of grounded freedom emerging from our inseparability from the natural world to which we owe our physical being. There are also individual thinkers who carry seeds of that awareness to us and whose work needs to be reappraised, demarginalised and used to help build our new/old metaphysics of liberation.

One of these is Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), better known as Paracelsus. The wandering Swiss-born polymath, philosopher and physician is often remembered today as one of the early precursors of modern medicine. But he in fact represents a late and creative flowering of an ancient way of thinking that was to be crushed under the iron wheels of industrial capitalism in the centuries to come. His philosophy is based on a holistic concept of living nature. He declares:

“Nature, made of the Universe, is one and its origin can only be the eternal Unity. It is a vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathise between themselves”.8

Animating all this is “the vital energy of the Universe (Spiritus Mundi)”,9 a “fundamental, invisible, vital, vitalising force”.10

Paracelsus (1493-1541) #1 Photograph by Granger – Fine Art America

 

Lucien Braun summarises Paracelsus’s idea of nature thus:

“It is indeed everything that we see before our eyes: trees, minerals, animals, diseases, birth, death… But what it gives us is always something else as well: the manifestation of a ‘deeper’ reality – although for the time being we cannot define this depth more clearly. Nature is simultaneously visible and invisible: visible in form, invisible in power – but the two aspects are intimately bound”.11

He explains how, for Paracelsus, “the Great World shines in every being, in every plant, in every mineral”.12 It does so by means of a subsidiary principle, a star or Gestirn, which lies behind their particular physical form. A specific seed grows into a specific tree because of this inner essence manifesting itself.

“It’s advisable, therefore, not to remain on the superficial level of things, or to look merely at the determination of forms. On the contrary, we should never consider a visible determination without at the same time considering the agency presupposed by this determination, in other words the invisible and secret force behind the principle of its manifestation. This is how we must read nature, everywhere: in the intimate unity of the visible and the invisible”.13

Even when we are engaged in philosophy, we cannot leave the realm of a nature which is, after all, universal and all-embracing. Nature is certainly the object of Paracelsus’s enquiries: “What is philosophy if not the discovery of invisible nature?”,14 he asks. But, at the same time, it is also their subject. The Paracelsian concept of the philosopher has nothing in common with the model of the modern scientist, an outside observer of all that takes place in the separated realm he is studying. “According to Paracelsus, the real philosopher no longer belongs to himself, but serves nature”, writes Patrick Rivière.15 More than serving nature, he is nature, serving itself. The philosopher and his philosophy are both part of the self-revealing of nature.

Paracelsus spent his life speaking out against dogmatism, against the fixed orthodoxy of Medieval medicine, against the exploitation of the poor: “in short”, says Braun, “against everything which he regarded as artifice or convention”.16 It is, therefore, nothing less than tragic that the breadth of his thinking, the opening-out of the human spirit that he represented, was to be closed down again by new waves of artifice and convention, new modern versions of dogmatism and orthodoxy. 6

The rationalism of the Enlightenment brought with it all the scientific, positivist thinking that fitted so well with the pragmatic realities of the capitalists’ Industrial Revolution. There was no more place for open-ended thinking, for the embracing of paradox, for the awareness that the mysteries of the universe must ultimately lie beyond the complete grasp of human beings. The multi-dimensionality of wisdom was replaced by the one-dimensionality of mere knowledge and “knowledge is truth externalised, displaced, thrown off centre. It is, for Paracelsus, something like sin”.17

Nature as seen by Paracelsus was not something that could readily be flattened out into a scientific theory or mathematical equation. As Braun says: “Nature, despite all the attempts at interpreting it, cannot be tied down (capitur): it instantly eludes all concept. It bursts the banks of language. And Paracelsus’s work can only be an impossible attempt to express with words (nearly 8,000 pages of them!) something which has always been thought by its author to stretch beyond the possibilities of plain logic”.18

The new industrial society needed a new definition of nature that could be expressed in its own restricted scientific language and which would “correspond with the new consciousness that man (now bourgeois) had of himself”.19 Thus, in the centuries following Paracelsus’s death, we see the ideological construction of “a nature which was inert (and thus artless, lifeless), which was conceived in mechanical terms and was therefore open to mechanisation and boundless manipulation”.20

MemoriesandMiscellany: Charles Darwin and “The Monkey’s Uncle”

 

A highly significant part of this process was the creation in the 19th century of a theory of evolution which fitted in perfectly with all the assumptions of imperialistic industrial capitalism. The message of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was taken to be that the domination of the poor by the rich, of workers by bosses, of indigenous people by Europeans, was all perfectly “natural”. Indeed, it was claimed, this domination was essential for evolution – if the economically and physically unfit were allowed to thrive and breed, the progress of humanity would be thrown into reverse.

The obvious response from socialists and anarchists, as Renaud Garcia states, was to “develop a critique of the ‘naturalist’ illusion, in other words the idea according to which we ascertain what we can justifiably expect from human societies on the basis of a human essence possessing a certain number of immutable characteristics”.21 But then anarchist scientist Peter Kropotkin came up with a new interpretation of the political implications of evolutionary theory. He showed that the struggle between individuals was an inadequate description of the workings of nature and that cooperative mutual aid was a much more important factor among all species, including humankind.

Kropotkin wrote in Mutual Aid, first published in 1902:

“‘Don’t compete! – competition is always injurious to the species and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!’ That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword that comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. ‘Therefore combine – practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral’. That is what Nature teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest position in their respective classes have done”.22

Mutual aid by Peter Kropotkin | Anarchist Library

 

In simple terms, he was saying that anarchism is natural – that, left to their own devices, people and other animals tend to cooperate with others for their collective benefit. Kropotkin was essentially echoing, in the scientific language of his time, Paracelsus’s vision of nature as “a vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathise between themselves”.

The view of nature as violently competitive has always been used as the pretext for the existence of a state in order to keep all the dreadful chaos under control. Demolishing this fake idea of “nature” and replacing it with an understanding of complex organic harmony would therefore seem to be central to the anarchist project. As Theodore Roszak has noted:

“Anarchism has always been, uniquely, a politics swayed by organic sensibility; it is born of a concern for the health of cellular structure in society and a confidence in spontaneous self-regulation”.23

Kropotkin’s ideological intervention totally undermined the industrial capitalist claim that its inhuman and exploitative system was merely evolution in practice – and thus, also, removed the need for anti-capitalists to distance themselves from any notion of nature. But while Kropotkin is still respected and quoted today, the primary relevance of his response to the reactionary Darwinists often seems to have been overlooked or misunderstood. The anarchic quality of nature, and thus the naturalness of anarchy, has not taken the central place in anarchist ideology that might have been expected. Under the pervasive influence of Enlightenment rationalism and its industrialist intellectual offshoots (including Marxism), many anarchists have kept the idea of nature at arm’s length.24 For all Kropotkin’s work, ideas of “naturalness” continue to be associated with reactionary positions and it is often held that there is no continuity between the natural world and human society. Ultimately, this amounts to a claim that human beings are somehow outside of nature altogether, as if we had dropped on to this planet from outer space. This is a metaphysical separation of “man” from “beast” shared with Christian dogma, a ridiculous human vanity that blinds us to the truth that for all our idiosyncrasies we remain animals, we remain part of nature.

N&A: Kropotkin sobre el anarco-individualismo norteamericano

 

Braun writes that when Paracelsus ponders what is philosophy “if not the discovery of invisible nature”, he goes on to declare that “all philosophy which deviates from that goal is pseudo-philosophy (Schaumphilosophie) and is like fungus growing on a tree and remaining outside it”.25 Any philosophy which is based on a denial of our belonging to nature is based on a lie. Any further ideas constructed on that mendacious foundation can have no truthful solidity. Since Paracelsus’s day, whole layers of Schaumphilosophie have accumulated in the modern mind, creating the artifice of Debord’s all-suffocating spectacle. These layers of falsity make it almost impossible to express truths that are denied by the spectacle. This is hardly surprising as that is the whole raison d’être of the falsity – it is intellectual cover for industrial capitalism, a fake “reality” in which that spectacle makes sense and anything outside of that spectacle makes no sense at all.

We have now reached a layer of falsity in which it has become possible not simply to claim that nature is something apart from humankind but to claim that nature does not exist at all and is merely a construct of humankind. Of course, human definitions of nature are all constructs. And the idea that we should or can define nature in the first place is the product of narrowed-down rationalist thinking. But the falsity of definitions of “nature” does not mean that nature itself does not exist! The fact that nature can never be defined does not mean that it does not exist. Indeed, we might almost say that its indefinable character is part of its (non-)definition. It simply cannot be reduced to mere words.

The inability to distinguish between words and reality is a key feature of contemporary Schaumphilosophie. It arises from the same human hubris that imagines us to be outside nature, superior to the rest of life on the planet. Our self-indulgent vanity has reached a level at which we imagine that the human words which we use actually create physical reality and that by exposing these words as mere words, we also somehow affect or undermine the physical reality they were intended to describe.26 Humans invent a word called “nature” to describe the world to which they belong and then declare that this was just a word they invented and that therefore they do not belong to the world at all! This is an advanced stage of sophisticated fakery – fabricating a lie and then pointing to its falsity in order to disallow the truth that it had falsely purported to designate.

All of this is the end result of a human subjectivity that has gone far beyond the stage necessary for us to conduct our subjective individual lives27 and has turned into an egocentric denial of external objective reality. Discussing Paracelsus’s understanding of a universe that reveals itself in us, Braun comments:

“It is clear that we find ourselves here at complete odds with everything that would be taught to us, in the centuries to come, by the philosophies of the subject which would try to explain the world on the basis of the capacities and categories of the subject! There, the world would become an image of myself. Here, it’s the World which tries to know itself and find its fulfilment through the human being”.28

Ultra-subjectivism on a philosophical level translates to ultra-individualism on a social level and the same barriers to contemporary understanding of Paracelsus also block understanding of anarchist thinking. The cooperative nature described by Kropotkin is the foundation stone of human society – society as it should be, in any case. But in a world that sees only atomised individuals creating their own subjective realities, what place is there for this collective level of human life, so important for socialist and anarchist theory? In our capitalist world of separation, any authentic communal belonging has to be destroyed so that each isolated individual has to turn to the system for their sense of identity, which is sold back to them in fake form as part of a lifelong process of exploitation based on dispossession.

The psychological separation of humanity from nature is part of the same phenomenon as our separation from each other in our industrial capitalist cities. The anarchist aim of reforging those social bonds, creating solidarity and mutual aid, therefore goes hand in hand with the aim of reforging our bonds with nature. Reversal of separation, reversal of isolation, reversal of exploitation, reversal of ultra-individualism, reversal of ultra-subjectivism, reversal of capitalism, reversal of industrialism – these are not so much intersecting struggles as facets of one and the same effort.

The immediate task at hand is the peeling away of all the layers of lies, of Schaumphilosophie, that have accumulated over the centuries. However, this is incredibly difficult, since we all live entirely within the spectacle of lies that is deceiving us. Insights that come from somewhere outside that paradigm make no sense to someone whose understanding of the world is entirely contained within the fake assumptions it harbours. The idea that we could live without a state seems laughably naïve to someone who has been conditioned to believe that authority exists to protect us, not to enslave us, that we need rulers in order to stop society descending into the chaotic violence that would inevitably result if we were left to our own devices. The idea that we could live happily without industrial infrastructure seems ridiculous to someone whose whole life has been led within that system, who associates the search for food with visits to the supermarket and companionship with electronic communication. The idea that we, as human beings, are part of nature seems absurd and dangerous to someone who has learnt to regard nature as either an external nonhuman reality, a romanticised fantasy or a kind of violent brute force that has constantly to be repressed by civilized human society.

The Schoolmaster, pintada por René Magritte en 1954 | Magritte …

It is not just our intellectual environment that determines these reactions, but the physical one, too. If we live in an urban, industrialised outer world then our inner world risks being limited to the shallowness of all that is urban and industrialised. Braun writes that Paracelsus’s ideas make no sense in the context of modern surrounds which “impoverish us to our very depths by depriving us of real images, by filling our vision with right angles and machines, in other words with ontologically shallow products spawned by a rationalism of representation. We are far from the sights which would have sparked Paracelsus’s imagination in the depths of the Swiss forests, teeming with forms and beings, and which would have spoken to him in quite a different way than do the concreted spaces of today”.29

If our everyday experience is of traffic jams, shopping malls and office blocks, if our minds are constantly filled with images of consumerism, domination and war, how are we to see the world as “a vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathise between themselves”? The answer is in our imagination. As anarchists have long understood, another world is always possible and will flourish in our collective mind long before it becomes a physical reality. We need to imagine ourselves out of the suffocating confines of industrial capitalism, leaping over all the barriers of lies that it has erected around us. We need to dream ourselves into a state of authenticity – to allow nature to dream itself into the core of our inner being. “Freedom for Paracelsus is anything but the arbitrary will of the subject,” says Braun. “It is not defined on the basis of the subject, of the will of the subject. Instead, it’s an act of letting-be, letting nature illuminate itself in us”.30

We need to reach out beyond the cardboard cut-out words which seek to define, reduce and destroy reality; we need to feel within ourselves the Spiritus Mundi, the vital energy of the universe. This is how we can find freedom, the natural freedom of anarchy which arises from intertwined individuality and collectivity, unaffected by the metaphysical separation that is the “alpha and omega of the spectacle”. And if this authenticity is hidden from us by an ultraindividualism and ultra-subjectivity that has enclosed the whole terrain of modern industrialised thinking, then we will have to tear down the barriers of that false mindset and plant a holistic philosophy for the future in the living soil of our neglected metaphysical past.

This essay originally appeared in Paul Cudenec’s Nature, Essence & Anarchy.

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1. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 1, p. 3.

2. Debord, 53, p. 31.

3. Debord, 199, p. 152.

4. Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex: Winter Oak Press, 2014).

5. Debord, 25, p. 13.

6. John Zerzan, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2015), p. 97.

7. Zerzan, p. 106.

8. Paracelsus, cit. Patrick Rivière, Paracelse: medicinalchimiste, “philosophe par le feu” (Paris: Éditions de Vecchi, 2008), p. 97.

9. Rivière, p. 58.

10. Roland Edighoffer, Préface, in Lucien Braun, Paracelse (Paris-Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 1995) p. x.

11. Braun p. 36.

12. Braun pp.158-59.

13. Braun, p. 37.

14. Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, VIII, 71, cit. Braun p. 51.

15. Rivière, p. 91.

16. Braun, p. 11.

17. Braun p. 34.

18. Braun p. 31.

19. Braun p. 43.

20. Ibid.

21. Renaud Garcia, La nature de l’entraide: Pierre Kropotkine et les fondements biologiques de l’anarchisme (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2015), p. 16.

22. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Freedom Press, 1993), p. 73.

23. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 424.

24. François Jarrige, for instance, tells how the anarchisme naturien which emerged in Paris and elsewhere in France at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century was attacked and sidelined both by Marxists and by elements within the anarchist movement itself and eventually disappeared, only to re-emerge in the 21st century in the form of the anarchist wing of the contemporary décroissance (degrowth) movement. François Jarrige, Gravelle, Zisly et les anarchistes naturiens contre la civilisation industrielle (Neuvy-en-Champagne: Éditions le passager clandestin, Les Précurseurs de la Décroissance collection, 2016).

25. Braun p. 51.

26. See 2. Denying reality: from nominalism to newthink.

27. See 7. Necessary subjectivity.

28. Braun, pp. 157-58.

29. Braun, pp. 238-39.

30. Braun, pp. 45-46