Beyond Natural and Artificial

I am hereby responding to the Comment by De Franco (2023) on my article Natural or artificial: a reflection on a complex ontology (Cameli, 2021). First of all, I would like to point out that I believe the author of this Comment to have provided a clear and well-reasoned overview of the intellectual pathway so far followed, as well as some intriguing ways ahead for the advancement of this research program.

Let me just recall here the three main passages of this Hegelian dialectic process, useful to put in a greater perspective the following discussion. The starting point was the incoherence displayed by urban planning literature about the ontological status of the city, swinging seamlessly between the city-as-artifact (thesis) and the city-as-organism (antithesis) metaphor, generating for a long time quite a regrettable confusion about such a fundamental feature of the very object of our analysis. The synthesis was the idea of the city as being composed by both an “artefactual” and a “natural” component – the cyborg city. However, as I tried to demonstrate, while satisfactory at first glance, this synthesis is indeed flawed by huge unresolved theoretical issues, and it is thus unfit to deal with the next developments of urban realms such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

This was, in general terms, the pars destruens. Now, we urge to focus on the pars construens. How can we imagine a novel approach going beyond simple hybridization? Indeed, substituting the natural/artificial dichotomy with the natural∼artificial complementarity is dense with important consequences. First of all, it eliminates an ontological difference between animal architectures (such as honeycombs, shells, beaver dams) and man-made creations such as cities: in this context, the entire history of life on Earth appears as a continuous transformation of the environment. Furthermore, this transformation does not happen ceteris paribus: it has instead an ontogenetic stance and defines an operational closure, since a changing environment will trigger changes in the other competing forms of life, creating new unintended niches and collapsing others, insofar causing a never-ending cascade of mutual adaptations and changes – i.e., co-evolution (Kauffman, 2000). Due to co-evolution, a living species exercises, by the mere fact of existing, some kind of influence on all the others: many species of insects would look way less colorful or diversely shaped if they did not evolve under selective pressure. On a broader perspective, this means that the ‘environment’ simply does not exist without ‘humanity’, and vice versa. What Heidegger called the Dasein, i.e. our Being-In-The-World, has a role in defining the world itself – or put differently, the very essence of the world in which we live depends on our presence/absence, substantiating a symbiotic ontic relationship. Adopting a dynamic, co-evolutionary view, is in fact impossible to draw a line between the “human-influenced” and “non-human influenced” environment: due to breeding or hunting, the very genotype of many vegetal and animal radically changed, as well as the landscape, and this in turn opened novel niches and opportunities to be exploited by new forms of life.

Whereas this approach seems to endorse a total de-exceptionalization of humanity, completely equalled to the rest of the living world, paradoxically, it in fact re-discovers the homo mensura putting back humanity figuratively at the center of the world. I particularly appreciated the following line of De Franco’s work: “to understand urban realms one does not necessarily need a quantum leap (Cameli, 2021: 15) but a ‘humanistic’ one: that is, one that systematically bringing the ‘social/institutional’ dimension into the ontological debate”. What I found possibly the most intriguing thing in all this theoretical venture is the fact that, while searching for ‘absolute nature’, one ended up finding the human mind. As recalled, complexity theories of cities, for instance, started from the illusion of finding the rules of self-organization lying at the basis of the natural development of cities, and, with what I called the ‘cognitivist revolution’, ended up dismissing the reductionist assumption that humans can be thought of as cellular automata, advocating instead a way more challenging perspective in which they are complex adapting systems themselves, continuously producing sense out of the space-time environment in which they live – a neo-humanist perspective. I regarded this idea as the first spark of a yet to come paradigm definitively transcending hybridization whose main features I tried to sketch, starting from cognitive sciences/complexity and Urban Political Ecology. This paradigm internalizes the cultural/cognitive aspect of ‘nature’ and focuses on the capacity of the human mind to actively have a role in ‘co-constructing’ the world: coherently, the environment can be seen almost as a projection of the human mind, something like the ‘Songlines’ in Australian Aboriginal culture. In other words, the Dasein of humanity overlaps what has been called a ‘semiosphere’ to the complex net of competitive co-construction of the environment taking place within the biosphere (Hartley, Ibrus, Ojamaa, 2020).

In this context, I believe De Franco to have shown a direction of undoubted value for the perspective development of this paradigm. I agree on the fact that contributions coming from social ontology can play a role in shaping the philosophical discourse in a post-dualist, post-hybrid world. As she points out, studies in social ontology “[…] avoid making the distinction between natural and artificial the focus of the discourse, and they shift the attention to the more decisive difference between brute facts and social facts.” The crucial issue, thus, here becomes: what is the relationship between ‘brute’ and ‘social’ facts? And, above all, what does define a ‘fact’?

Let me highlight here some interesting theoretical issues linked with this approach. For instance, even the sentence “The existence and functioning of the moon or rainforests are facts attributable to the physical and biological world: they exist before (and definitely without) us” is full of interesting consequences. The planet, as a noumenon, is for certain existing outside of us – but are we sure the same holds for the phenomenon, the concept of ‘planet’, i.e. its perceived shape, observed color or its astrological/mythological meaning? Counterfactually, without us there would still be a noumenic physical planet, but not a phenomenical planet. Similarly, the ‘functioning’ of the solar system according to celestial mechanics is a description derived by the human mind. So, where does the limit between the human dependent and the human-independent are? And, more provocatively, are there limits? Or should we consider the world – or at least everything we would meaningfully call the world – as something inherently linked to our very existence? Even more wildly, if we accept the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the very notion of ‘fact’ has to do with the very structure of the language we speak. In process-oriented languages, for instance, focusing more on the holistic space-time action flow rather than on the objects involved, the same event would be granted a different status as ‘fact’. Finally, what is the connection between the notion of ‘fact’ and epistemological development? For instance, before the advent of complexity, some ‘facts’ were not facts at all, but rather “turbulences” on the landscape of a ‘clockwork universe’. The development of novel theoretical tools in the form of new mathematical instruments such as Thom’s archetypes of catastrophes or strange attractors kind of made ‘visible’ previously ‘invisible’ facts. As Morin (1985) pointed out, the hyper-rationalist thought arrived to believe that anything not suitable to be formalized/quantified did not exist at all. Indeed, there appear to be something like a co-evolutionary feedback loop between the epistemological development of theoretical tools and the landscape of ‘facts’ on which they are to be used.

What I want to stress here is that, in conclusion, there is something very noticeable emerging out of this discussion: we are now talking about human perceptions, ideas, social structures – we brought the discussion back to the right field, i.e., the human mind. Moving the debate field away from the notions of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ and explicitly reframing it on ‘facts’ – providing thus an indirect linkage with semiotics, cognitive sciences, philosophy – is an important step towards a neo-humanistic approach to urban planning and sustainability.