Geophilosophy: A Revised Concept of Nature

Onto-cartography is a geophilosophy. I borrow the term “geophilosophy” from Deleuze and Guattari (see Deleuze and Guattari 1996: ch. 4), but here develop the concept in accord with the requirements of onto-cartography. What I wish to retain from the concept is the idea of a philosophy necessarily of the earth and restricted to the material world. Geophilosophy has connotations of the earth and territory. At the level of theory or ontological commitments, geophilosophy contends that there are only worlds and that worlds are composed entirely of machines and couplings between machines which are themselves machines. Even incorporeal machines require corporeal bodies to travel throughout the world. The medium through which incorporeal machines take on a corporeal body will have a profound effect on thought and social relations. For example, a society based on orality will be different than one based on writing. Cognition will be different as a result of these two media as well. Thus geophilosophy is committed to the tradition of materialism descended from Democritus, and advocates a strict immanence of being against all transcendence. In the final analysis, there are only material or earthly beings. Whatever matter might turn out to be – discovery of the being of matter is still an ongoing project – the matter that makes up earth is never a formless stuff awaiting formation from the outside, but rather has a form or structure internal to it or constitutive of its being.

Here language might be misleading, so it’s important to proceed with care. By “corporeal” I just mean “physical,” “material,” or “embodied.” Whatever matter might turn out to be – energy, indestructible particles, patterns, etc. – all machines are corporeal, embodied, or material. This entails that onto-cartography is committed to the thesis that entities such as souls as conceived by Plato, forms, angels, gods, and so on don't exist. However, here it's necessary to distinguish between "part materialism" and, for lack of a better term, "emergence materialism.