Antinatures

Three different conceptions of antiphysis or antinature are used by Sartre and De Beauvoir in their work, and I've been frustratingly trying to derive some consistent meanings. Here are some examples of what I mean:

(1)-“THE theory of historical materialism has brought to light some most important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action.” – Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex

(2)-“About 1848 the combined actions of the Saint-Simonians, the Positivists and Marx gave birth to the dream of an ‘anti-nature’. The expression ‘anti-nature’ was actually invented by Comte; and in the Marx-Engels correspondence we find the term antiphysis. The doctrines may be different but the ideal was the same: it was to inaugurate a human order which would be directly opposed to the errors, injustices, and blind mechanical forces of the natural World. The new factor which distinguished this order from the ‘City of ends’ which Kant put forward at the close of the eighteenth century and which he, too opposed to strict determinism. The new factor was work [labor]”- Jean Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (addition in parentheses mine)

The history Sartre gives here for the term 'antiphysis' is probably dubious though the shared conception may be right. if anyone can find where Marx or Engels use it (if they really did) let me know. But finally, later Sartre...

(3)-“nature is universality, which means that, at first sight the worker is just like the bourgeois. Respectability is anti-nature. The bourgeois becomes respectable (distingue) by suppressing his needs.”- Jean Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot

We have here antiphysis/antinature used not just in three contexts but in three very distinct senses. In (1) anti-nature simply is the human reality or at least an aspect of it. By virtue of being conscious subjects, able to perform not just actions but praxis, humanity is then, by definition a sort of animal-that-is-not-an-animal. Not just a little different (smarter, able to do more) but of a whole other qualitative order. Readers of Shulamith Firestone know this is used to great effect in her work.

In (2), anti-nature is not the human reality, but a human project, something to be realized with the proper social, political, and technological machinery. Yet it does share a commonality with (1) in that the intention is precisely to create a human totality (one that reflects the intent of serving human needs), in the same sense that ‘nature’ is supposed to be the given totality.

(3), however, is the most difficult to relate of the bunch, because it refers to a kind of subject-position. A person is anti-nature in the sense that they could also be anti-waste (thrifty) or pro-family (patriarchal). The practice of suppressing the public appearance of one’s biological body and the creation of distinction is here an open display of one’s anti-natural attitude. We’re not like those “salt of the earth” people, the distinguished person says, they’re more akin to animals than ourselves.

Of the quotes, this usage I find the least interesting, partly because it only actually refers to one particular kind of subject position among the well-to-do in response to workers’ collective demands. Social Darwinism and the fad for phrenology could hardly be taken as attempts to cover up the biological, just the opposite. Sartre’s disciplined bourgeois of The Family Idiot aren’t a universal type, even in their own era.

The other aspect of this conception of antinature as a subject position that is deeply unsatisfying is how it drains the radically utopian content out of antiphysis and leaves us with a practically zero-sum choice. One is either distinguished or vulgar, that is, one either accepts nature or represses it in one’s own self. The fantastic possibility of emancipation from nature, and of natural constraints; of free subjects able to stand apart from nature by virtue of ‘satisfying animal needs’ or post-human transcendence of those needs (or both) is rendered absent.

For that reason I think I’ll focus on the two others in future writing.