Ithas often been remarked that we cannot live as humans without constituting a world. Being “in” the world is like looking at the glass from the inside, and, being ourselves inside, we cannot perceive the glass the way it is. This negation of any “transcendent” perspective, from which we could see the way things really are, as we’d be seeing them ‘from the outside’ (some ‘fourth dimension’), constantly throws us back into our own worldliness. There is no culture without artifice; and yet, they all lay claim to understanding things ‘the way they really are’. Still, each leap into such an ‘outside’ position throws us back into the interiority from whence we came; unable to escape, the glass constitutes the limit of the trapped fly’s world, beyond which anything is possible. What lies beyond the horizon is excluded; ‘the world’ is not ‘the outside’, it is that which we are submerged in. It is this self-limitation that is the prerequisite for us to inhabiting a home.
In principle, ‘constituting a world’ means dividing our environment into an inside and an outside, ‘us’ and the ‘foreign land’ where ‘there be dragons’. In constituting a world, we divide our experiences into the habitual and the unhabitual; ‘habitually’, precisely, means, according to a regularity, to a consistency of what can and should happen in the world. Habit is whatever we repeat. The return of winter must become habitual in order to allow future planning, stocking up food for the fruitless seasons. It would be unhabitual if winter didn’t come, it would throw off our planning ahead. Where there is habit, in its many forms and durations (the return of the seasons, of the sun, of the air we breathe), there is a world. The world is what promises a future. Phenomenologically, a world feels like home; precisely because it has become one – habit, habitat. Living is inhabiting, becoming a local. The consistency of the world does not permit everything to happen; only what is supposed to return, to be perpetuated (stocking up for winter, breathing in and out), is to persist. The regularity of habit is what permits us to live habitually, to inhabit our world.
Now, the precise shape and form of this consistency varies between cultures. It is what always produces a minimal clash between civilisations; their unhabitual way of doing things. Preparing for tornado or flood season; how weird in a place without tornadoes or floods. Cultural exchange can happen only where cultures differ; but each culture, having learned in its own way of being nurtured by nature, will lay claim to exclusivity of sense (the way things should be). Consistency, in that sense, concerns a culture’s way of dealing with nature, relating to it as a home. The forest provides, but so does the desert. It provides because it is a home. Consistency is not just the regularity of the natural phenomena, like a seasonally returning rain that will nourish our fields, promising to do so again next time around, but the human behaviour that prepares for what’s about to come. Locals are the first to observe when the season’s changing, how to adapt to the new season (what fruits and vegetables to expect, for example, or what to wear). People need to behave habitually for the consistency of the world to hold.
Now, the crucial question is: what happens when the habitual ways of nature are interrupted, where the seasons no longer bring what we expect? Summers no longer feel like summers, neither do autumns; there’s nobody on this planet that doesn’t feel that. It’s a phenomenological fact, confirmed by empirical and rational knowledge. But a world that becomes unhabitual, that is impossible to live in, because its regularities are interrupted, can it still be called a world? The world is a world where it is consistent, where habitual things happen, where people behave ‘normally’. Once regularity stops, “there is no more nature,” because nature nourished us as long as we knew hat to expect from it. Being able to predict the nature of winter, its intensity or mildness, is a clear sign of occupying a space as a living being that is used to live at this very place.
But if culture is based on regularity, and human life is defined by the occupation of a world as a consistent space, what about our own humanity when al regularity ceases due to a “déréglément” (time is out of joint…)? Climate is the repetition of environmental factors; without regularity, there is no climate. But is there a world without climate? If the desert can nourish us, it’s because the desert as well is somehow predictable. Once “time is out of joint,” once there is nothing that returns that we’d call a season, the conditions of possibility for our flourishing are suspended. Such thoughts are worrisome. Our habitual way of life – globally speaking, concerning the effects of human life on the planet, as a human habitat – would in such a scenario prevent the emergence of a regularity outside of humanity, as something like ‘savage’ nature. ‘Savage’ nature being the eternal outside of human cultures, needs itself be nourished as the aspect of unpredictability within the predictable, the power of chance within any machinery, as well-oiled as it might be. The infinitely small possibility that things could go the other way, that the catastrophe might not affect us personally after all, is ironically that which permits us to keep going, participating in the global de-regularisation, and, in that sense, suspension of nature.