In philosophy and theory there is always a struggle with language. While new coinings occasionally take place, the norm is rather that terms must be wrested from ordinary language and put to different uses. There is always a danger here, for the terms continue to carry the connotations of ordinary language, yet theory also attempts to sever some of those connotations and also send the terms in a new or different direction. Aristotle took the Greek word kategorein, meaning “to accuse” and gave it an entirely different inflection far from this connotation. We can imagine how perplexed his audience was and that they said things like “but those aren’t accusations!” as if ordinary language should be a guide to philosophy. Heidegger takes the German term Dasein, meaning to “exist”, and transforms it into an account of being-in-the-world. Theoretical language does not treat ordinary language as a normative authority defining proper and improper use (Wittgenstein’s shameful idea), but instead struggles with the language it is thrown into– for it must work with something –so as to liberate a concept that departs from ordinary language. If ordinary language is the house, not of being, but of doxa, then theory is, in part, a struggle against the doxa housed in ordinary language. Often theory loses in this struggle with ordinary language. Doxa has its day and swallows up the concept through a triumph of common connotations. That’s how it often goes. But there’s no other way.
So it is with the term “ecology”. Ecology is relegated to the status of a regional ontology and is therefore only of interest to philosophers and theorists who work on climate, environmental issues, nature in literature, etc. Ecology, ordinary language says, is an investigation of nature, the environment, climate, and what is green. Those theorists interested in politics, the nature of knowledge. science, art, ethics, literature, society, etc., therefore have– the thinking it goes –no need to attend to ecology. It’s outside their research area.
read on!
But ecology is not the name of a regional ontology, of a discipline that investigates nature or the environment. To be sure, this form of thinking have been fruitfully applied in those domains– of course, ecology, outside green ecology anyway, has also had the valuable effect of leading us to question the concept of nature altogether –however, ecology isn’t a thesis about nature but rather a thesis about being. And, of course, it goes without saying so I’ll say it, that being is something that includes both “nature” and culture, meaning and matter, society and the environment, mind and world.
The ontological thesis of ecology is pan-ontological. Pan-ecology is the thesis that being is ecological through and through. Ecology is not defined by a domain of study because everything is ecological, but rather is defined by a style of thinking: a thinking that approaches beings in terms of being-with, investigating them as separable while nonetheless inhabiting assemblages in which they interact with one another, affect one another, depend on one another in a variety of ways, dominate and get dominated by one another, and above all touch one another. To think ecologically is to think in terms of systems and interactions rather than in terms of isolated and separated beings. It is to think in terms of horizons such that every being is surrounded by a horizon of relations and interactions like the penumbra about the sun, making that entity what it is. Ecology is not the name for something good, because, in fact, many ecologies are frightful and horrific, generating massive suffering for their inhabitants. Rather, it’s a name for being-with… And as we all know, there are many entities we’d prefer not to be with such as cancer causing pathogens, oppressive racists, etc., etc., etc.
Larval Subjects . 
February 12, 2015 at 6:09 pm
Hello, thanks for this excellent post. I would like to ask you if you know about a new term/word that embraces what you called “being with”? Something to replaces “nature”, “ecology” “living”?
February 12, 2015 at 6:17 pm
Well ecology shouldn’t be treated as a synonym for “living”. There are ecologies that involve living beings such as cities and rain forests, but there are also ecologies that, so far as we know, don’t involve living beings at all such as the composition of gases on Saturn and how they interact with solar particles. An acceptable ecology must abandon any form of vitalism and teleology.
February 12, 2015 at 6:23 pm
That’s a good point. Thanks. I guess I was asking about a word, a new word that embraces nature/culture, society/environment, mind/body . I guess it can be ecology if it’s understood in the way you are proposing. But it is still too charged with “nature”…I think we need a new term.
February 12, 2015 at 6:31 pm
Nice. I think, here, of Nancy’s being singular plural — being as being-with — or of Sloterdijk’s fomay spherology, as emerging exemplars of a pan-ecology.
February 12, 2015 at 6:33 pm
Ooops – posted too fast. Fomay should be ‘foamy’
February 13, 2015 at 3:56 am
Reblogged this on Constructive Undoing and commented:
(Come back for some CU commentary…).
February 13, 2015 at 5:45 am
I was just thinking about an ecology of thought today: about how we could replace the Cartesian res cogitans with the ecosystem. It is not I that thinks, but rather the ecosystem that thinks me, thinks through me.
In this formulation, thought is a collaboration among its objects and its substrate, or more precisely, between the flows of energy that impact it and the physiological articulations that underlie it. The subject is merely one of its contents.
I’m using ecology a bit more literally than you here, but I think keeping the connotation of the Earth’s living systems is useful in connecting our thinking and our ontology with our biological interdependence with all Earth life.
February 13, 2015 at 5:48 am
@mpdoming: In The Three Ecologies Guattari uses to use the term ecosophy to describe, broadly, what you’re after. Actually, there’s also a great line in one D&G’s joint works about the issue Levi raises around ordinary language. To paraphrase from faded memory, sometimes philosophers are forced to create barbaric new words whereas other times they resort to using ordinary words that are then loaded with all sorts of rarified allusions, resonances, etc.
I wish I could remember where in their work that’s from and what they actually said…