Honorary Fellow’s Christmas Lecture, University College Scarborough, 11th December 1997.

I shall begin by explaining what Gaia, or the Gaia hypothesis, is; I shall then discuss the significance of its name; and finally I shall argue that it is as much a metaphysical as a scientific thesis, and one which has a long and distinguished pedigree.

The Gaia hypothesis was developed by a free-lance chemist and instrument designer, James E. Lovelock. The background is that he was working on a NASA project to discover whether there was life on Mars. But he believed that the project was fundamentally flawed, in that they were searching for the living organisms themselves, which would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Rather, they should be looking for evidence that the chemistry of the Martian atmosphere was such that it could be kept in equilibrium only by the presence of life.

This led him to consider the Earth’s atmosphere, which consists of an unstable mixture of gases, but which has remained broadly unchanged for a very long period of time. In other words, without some countervailing cause, the composition of the atmosphere would be very different from what it is now — in fact it would consist almost entirely of carbon dioxide, instead of a mere 0.03%; and life as we know it would be unsustainable. The orthodox explanation was that gases such as nitrogen and oxygen were constantly being replenished by purely chemical reactions in the sea and land masses. Lovelock argued that, not only were these factors insufficient to account for the actual composition of the atmosphere, but even if they were, it was an accident on a cosmic scale that its composition had remained for so long within the narrow bounds necessary for life.

What goes for the atmosphere goes for the biosphere as a whole — that is, the air, the sea, and the land surface in which life is found. For example, the temperature of the sun has risen by about 30% since life first began; yet the average temperature of the biosphere has never varied by more than a few degrees. Again, in an equilibrium state, the sea would be too salty for living cells, since their moisture would be sucked out of them by osmosis; yet its salinity has remained at a consistently low level.

Lovelock’s hypothesis was that, instead of life having to adapt itself to a physical environment over which it had no control, life itself was responsible for maintaining the physical balance at the optimum level. And this is where the metaphysical fun begins. As someone who is a metaphysician but not an environmental scientist, I am in no position to judge the scientific merits of Lovelock’s hypothesis — though it does strike me as a provocative and well-argued contribution to the debate. But, like all revolutionary paradigm shifts in science, it has a metaphysical dimension. And here Lovelock is distinctly wobbly, since he has three mutually contradictory metaphysical theories, and he blithely jumps from one to another without seeming to recognise how different they are.

Here I should say that I am basing my account on his book: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1979), and last week’s television broadcast: Earth and Life (BBC2, 7.30, 5 December 1997).

The three theories are as follows:

1. The planet Earth is a single organism endowed with consciousness, and with the power to adapt its body to its own purposes. In effect it is divine — it is the goddess called Gaia.
2. The biosphere functions as an organic whole. It has no consciousness, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; all the parts are interconnected; and self-regulatory mechanisms maximise the stability of the whole.
3. The biosphere is not an organism, but purely mechanical causes operating through living beings happen to make it stable.

I shall focus on the first two theories, since I do not believe Lovelock is sincere in putting forward the third. It is quite out of tune with what he says most of the time, and I can only assume that he sometimes adopts purely mechanistic language in order to appease orthodox scientists. He is trying to reach two audiences: the general public, and scientific experts. As a relative outsider, he is often contemptuous of the academic establishment — in particular of the way in which powerful professors jealously guard their own bit of intellectual territory. Moreover, it is difficult for researchers to get their findings published in academic journals unless they are professional academics, and especially if they question the prevailing scientific paradigms. Lovelock knows that he is more likely to be taken seriously by scientists if he uses the language of mechanistic materialism and experimental verification.

So let us now turn to the first of his metaphysical theories, which is clearly directed towards a popular rather than a scientific audience, and which explains his adoption of the term Gaia. In the television programme, Lovelock reveals that he adopted the name long after he had developed the hypothesis itself. It was suggested to him by his friend, the novelist William Golding, as a way of getting his ideas across to non-scientists.

I find this a very striking admission in the context of current debates about the nature of science. Post-modernist philosophers see a close analogy between science and literature. Novelists use a special language to tell stories about things and events which are not given to us in our actual experience, and spin travellers’ tales about times and places we have never visited. Similarly, scientists go behind the world of everyday experience, and use a special language — a mixture of mathematics and metaphor — to tell stories about a strange world we have never visited, and can never visit, but which is said to underlie and be the cause of the world we construct in our experience. Understandably, scientists don’t like being classed along with novelists. For the most part they have simply ignored this analysis of what they are doing, and it is a rare event when scientists such as Alan Sokal rise to the challenge, and attempt to show by reasoned argument that they are discovering the objective truth. However, Alan Sokal’s onslaught, which has received a wide airing in the serious press, is directed more towards the obscure language favoured by the Paris fashion houses of philosophy, than to the genuine philosophical insights themselves. There is a long tradition of philosophers who maintain that all our knowledge must be based on experience, and that any account of a transcendent reality underlying experience is at worst a complete fiction, and at best a story which can be told only through metaphor and analogy, and with a loose connection to the world as we actually experience it. Be that as it may, Lovelock took a conscious decision to ally himself with the novelistic or mythical interpretation of science.

Why Gaia? — or Gaea, as she is traditionally known. Gaia was the Greek earth goddess, or mother earth. However, she is an inappropriate metaphor for Lovelock’s hypothesis in at least two ways. First, there is little evidence that she was ever the object of a major cult. Her role was more historical, as one stage in the various creation myths. She was the daughter of Chaos, and both mother and wife of Ouranos the sky god, from whom she became divorced. She later gave birth to the Giants — and all this before the Olympian gods came into being. In Greek religion, the mother-earth function was fulfilled more by Demeter, whose name, according to some etymologists, means ‘mother earth’. Although, strictly, she was the goddess of corn, she represented the fertility of the soil, and was worshipped as such in the Eleusynian mysteries.

The second reason why Gaia is inappropriate is because Lovelock wants her to represent the whole biosphere — the sky and the sea as well as the soil. But Gaia is the goddess of the soil alone, with other gods, such as Ouranos and Poseidon, for the sky and the sea. The idea that the whole planet, including the biosphere, might be a divinity came much later, with the rise of philosophical religions such as Stoicism in about 300 BC. For the Stoics, there was one God, whom they identified with Reason, or the Word, as it is translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible. In human beings, as rational animals, reason is identified with the soul, which animates the whole body. In exactly the same way, God is the soul of the whole world. He unites it into an organic whole with a purpose; and human virtue consists in aligning one’s attitudes to divine providence, or living in accordance with nature. All in all, it’s a very appropriate philosophy for the modern ecological movement.

However, this still doesn’t capture Lovelock’s idea of the planet earth as a goddess. The Stoics believed that the cosmos consisted of nothing more than the earth, the sea, and the sky, surrounded by fire which we glimpse through tiny holes in the firmament. Neither the Earth nor the cosmos was a planet. After it became accepted in the seventeenth century that the Earth is just one planet among many circling the sun, and that the stars are an immense distance away, we still find pantheistic philosophies which preserve the essence of Stoicism. The most famous example is that of Spinoza, who identified God with the whole of nature. But the body of God is not just planet Earth, but the whole universe, of which the Earth is an insignificant little part.

In short, it is very difficult to find any historical precedent for the concept of the planet Earth as a living organism worthy of worship. Nevertheless, Lovelock’s idea has been eagerly taken up by new-agers, and the mystical fringe of the environmental movement. Gaia has virtually become a trademark, with Gaia cafés, Gaia magazines, and so on. But its very success — what one might call the Glastonbury effect — has made it all the more difficult for Lovelock’s core thesis to be accepted by sober, academic scientists. And Lovelock makes it clear, right in the first paragraph of his book, that the religious aspect is peripheral. He says of the belief that Mother Earth lives:

What is testable, is the non-religious hypothesis or model:

The crucial metaphysical thesis here is that the biosphere is a single organism. I said at the beginning that this approach has a long and distinguished pedigree. However, there is a problem over tracing this pedigree, since it’s only quite recently that words like ‘organism’ and ‘organic’ have been used in Lovelock’s sense. Thus, the first occurrence of ‘organic’ in the sense of ‘characterised by systematic connection or coordination of parts in one whole’ is attributed by the Oxford English Dictionary to Coleridge in 1817. Similarly, two of the Dictionary’s definitions of ‘organism’ are ‘an organised or organic system; a whole consisting of dependent and interdependent parts, compared to a living being;’ and ‘an organized body, consisting of mutually connected and dependent parts constituted to share a common life.’ Although the Dictionary claims to find examples as early as 1768, I am not convinced that the word was being used in this sense until the late nineteenth century, and even then it was restricted to living organisms. Its wider application had to wait for organicist philosophers such as Henri Bergson (1859–1941) in France, and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) in the English-speaking world.

Although the terminology has changed, the broad idea of an organism goes back at least as far as Aristotle. Aristotle set out to answer the general question: Why is an individual thing what it is? He came to the conclusion that, in every case, there are four types of answer: What it’s made of; how it was made; what it was made for; and that in virtue of which it’s the sort of thing it is. These came to be known as the ‘four causes’: the material cause (what it’s made of); the efficient cause (how it was made); the final cause (what it was made for, from the Latin fines meaning an end or purpose); and the formal cause. This last needs a little more explanation. Aristotle, following on from Plato, believed that every individual thing is a compound of two elements: matter and form. The form consists of those properties it has in common with other members of the same species, and the matter is what makes it a concrete individual, as contrasted with a mere abstract form. So the formal cause is the form.

In the middle ages, the scholastic philosophers (who were also the scientists of the time) based their teaching on Aristotle, who was known as The Philosopher. They elaborated his doctrines, and by the end of the sixteenth century, it’s fair to say that they were in broad agreement on the following principles:

1. Things are real, individual substances because their components are united into a single substance by their form (often called a ‘substantial form’).
2. Things themselves actually have the properties we perceive in them (though they may have additional occult powers or virtues which we can’t directly perceive).
3. The active powers of things reside in their form, rather then in their matter; and we know forms by reason, not by sense perception.
4. We are largely ignorant of the efficient causes of things, but we can understand final causes. For example, the most important fact about an acorn is that it is destined to become an oak tree if the conditions are right, even if we can’t understand how it imposes the form of an oak onto the earth, water, and air it absorbs. Again, the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth have their natural place, and the dynamo for their interactions is their desire to achieve an equilibrium in which fire will be at the top, and earth at the bottom — so fire rises through air, and earth sinks through water.

Now we come to the birth of modern science at the end of the sixteenth century — and, as we shall see, part of my thesis is that science is still suffering from a folk memory of its birth trauma.

The ideology of early modern science was a complete overturning of scholasticism. This was helped by the fact that virtually none of the new scientists (with the notable exception of Galileo and Newton) held university posts, or had any stake in preserving the intellectual status quo. It’s ironic that Lovelock is urging a restoration of some scholastic values from outside the present university system.

In opposition to the scholastics, the modern scientists were agreed on the following principles:

1. Individual things consist of accidental aggregates of matter. These aggregates have no real unity, and the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts. Substantial forms are a complete fiction.
2. Things themselves are quite unlike our perceptions of them. The only properties they have are quantifiable ones, which can be described mathematically. Our qualitative perceptions, such as colours, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings, are subjective affectations of the mind, and tell us nothing about reality.
3. The only power things have is that of pushing other things, and it resides in matter. There are no other powers.
4. Although God may have his purposes for nature, scientific explanations must be confined to efficient causes. There is no place for final causes, and least of all for vital forces.

However, there were two issues which divided the modern camp, and by and large the division corresponds to the English Channel. First, British scientists, when reflecting on what they were doing, tended to emphasise the role of experience — even if in fact what they were doing was mostly mathematics and reconceptualisation. The continentals were much easier about the idea that we might have a direct intellectual insight into reality. It is one of the paradoxes of the history of thought that Kant succeeded in making the priority of conscious experience a continental obsession, while English-language scientists seem stuck with a Lockean distinction between real primary qualities and illusory secondary ones, as if Berkeley and Hume had never existed.

The second issue is over the nature of causality. British philosophers and scientists tended to view mechanical causation as a relationship between two things — one distinct thing is the cause, and the other is the effect. On the Continent, the dominant model was of a holistic system, in which universal laws govern the transformation of the whole system from one instant to the next. As early as Huygens in the seventeenth century, light was conceived as a wave motion, where the whole is prior to the part (you can’t have half a wave). Whereas in Britain, the preferred model was of material particles (photons, if you like) bouncing off the surfaces of objects. In the present century, the conflict between the two approaches is graphically illustrated by wave/particle duality; but it cannot be said that the conflict has been finally resolved.

Even in the seventeenth century there was a backlash against the blanket condemnation of scholastic philosophy. In particular, Leibniz believed that the scholastic philosophers were right to insist that there could be no individual substances unless they possessed a principle of unity. For a thing to be a thing, it must be one thing, and not just an aggregate of parts. What makes a thing one thing is that it is an infinitely complex machine, in which the parts cooperate together for a common purpose. In modern terms, only organisms are real beings; and if complex systems exhibit the characteristics of an organism, then they are real beings. If Lovelock were a Leibnizian, he would be saying that the biosphere is an individual substance.

Both Leibniz and Lovelock are ambivalent as to whether an organic substance is aware of what it is doing. For Leibniz, only humans and superior beings, such as angels, have conscious awareness; but there is something analogous to perception and motivation in every genuine substance. This is Leibniz’s metaphysical explanation of how substances can function as organic wholes. It went down like a lead balloon with British scientists such as Isaac Newton, since it smacked of the scholastic substantial forms, final causes, and vital forces which modern science had struggled so hard to eliminate. Add to this the acrimonious squabble about whether Newton or Leibniz was the first to discover the infinitesimal calculus, and we have the main source of the growing divide between British and Continental science and philosophy. Indeed, the British Isles became a scientific and mathematical backwater for the best part of a century because of a xenophobic loyalty to the Newtonian method of fluxions, instead of the much more elegant notation for the calculus devised by Leibniz.

On the Continent, organicism received its most influential expression in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century. For Kant, every individual substance had to be a systematic whole, interacting with each other so as to make the universe itself a systematic whole as well. In addition, he rejected the typically British assumption that we know that the world consists of material particles moving around in space. Instead he insisted that scientific laws must ultimately be grounded in the world as we experience it, not in some underlying reality.

Kant’s work had a profound influence on the subsequent development of Continental philosophy, through romanticism, idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, and post-modernism. This influence was not confined to professional philosophers, since philosophy remained an integral part of a general education. German scientists knew their Kant. As for England (though not Scotland), philosophy virtually disappeared from the curriculum until the university reforms of the late nineteenth century. When philosophy was re-introduced, there was an initial fashion for idealism in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, but it had no impact on science. However, the early twentieth-century revolution in science, bringing with it relativity theory and quantum mechanics, stimulated a re-thinking of the metaphysical categories through which we understand the world — the nature of matter, space, time, and causality. In the English-speaking world, a number of scientifically literate philosophers argued that we can make sense of the new world of physics only if we reject the atomistic, materialist world-view in favour of one in which the basic entities are organic wholes. To give just two examples. General Jan Smuts (1870–1950) found time, while fighting the British and then running South Africa, to write a book called Holism and Evolution (Macmillan, 1926), in which he proposed just such a holistic approach — and, incidentally, was the first person to use the word ‘holism’. At about the same time, Alfred North Whitehead, who had earlier co-operated with the very un-Kantian Bertrand Russell in writing their revolutionary work on logic, Principia Mathematica, wrote a number of books putting forward his philosophy of organism, and establishing the word organism in this sense in the English language.

Nevertheless, these philosophers had a negligible impact on scientific thinking, and any talk of holism, or of organisms outside the field of biology, is treated with suspicion or downright hostility. To give just one example, the physicist David Bohm wrote many conventional books on physics, all of which are in the Brotherton Library at Leeds. Late in his career, he wrote a much more speculative and metaphysical work called Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1980), in which he argued for a holistic and organicist understanding of physics. Interestingly, it had not even been purchased by the library.

Finally, to return to Lovelock, we can now see that his treating the biosphere as an organism is not as radical a philosophical innovation as he may have thought. However, we have also explored the historical background to the hostility of English-language scientists in particular towards organicist thinking. If the recent television programme is anything to go by, Lovelock has backtracked considerably since writing the book Gaia. In order to obtain recognition by the scientific establishment, he has emphasised the experimental verifiability of his hypothesis, and searched for mechanisms to explain how the biosphere is self regulating. For example, he imagines a world populated by black and white daisies. If the world is at the cooler end of the temperature range at which daisies can grow, the black daises will do better since they absorb more heat. But the more they make the surface of the earth black, the more the earth as a whole will warm up, thus allowing the white daisies to flourish. But as the white areas spread, the earth will cool down again — and so on. Now, while this is an interesting example of a homeostatic mechanism, it is not inconsistent with conceptualising the biosphere as an organism — indeed, it reinforces it. But no amount of mechanisms will explain why the outcome is a relatively stable environment which remains suitable for life on earth, despite enormous physical changes, such as the rising temperature of the sun. This is where Lovelock needs the concept of an organism. So while I welcome the fact that the concept of the biosphere as a goddess was never intended to be taken literally, the idea of Gaia would be diluted beyond recognition if all that remains is a set of blind mechanical forces which just happen to result in a stable biosphere. Lovelock should have the courage of his metaphysical convictions, and stand by the idea that organisms are fundamental, and not merely the accidental by-products of matter.

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