Organism-Oriented Ontology Beyond the Anthropocene

This article explores different approaches to the notion of the Anthropocene, understood as a state associated with the increase of entropy and the destruction of biodiversity and habitats. Bernard Stiegler (2018; 2021) challenges such an approach with his own proposition – the Neganthropocene, claiming that while the Anthropocene is the time of entropy, the Neganthropocene should give rise to a new form of life, namely, negentropy. Yet the notion of negative entropy, or negentropy, derived from physics, is insufficient to explain the specificity of life and different orders of causality. An alternative approach can be found in Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, which allows us to explain living beings both with respect to self-organisation and self-maintenance, and interaction with the environment. The notion of autopoiesis can help to explain the functioning of living beings at different orders of complexity, from cells to Gaia. Gaia theory is seen as a more appropriate model to think both life’s self-maintenance and the potential for change. This means that to define life, we need a new theoretical framework and new concepts to account for the specificity of living beings. Therefore, my article proposes the theory of organism-oriented ontology, which defines the specific modes of existence of living beings.