In the 2017 film, Jungle, Israeli backpacker Yossi Ghinsberg follows a mysterious guide deep into the Bolivian wilderness. The guide launches into an unhinged sermon on the human ego, indigenous societies, and ecological destruction.

These words evoke the surprising coincidence of opposites between eco-pessimist and accelerationist thought, between Gaia and Prometheus.

Much of this book has been about highlighting the obvious contrasts between these two intellectual tendencies. The Gaian favors the local, and lives by the maxim that “small is beautiful.” They celebrate a sacralized, opaque version of nature which cannot (and should not) be entirely comprehended. Nature (or whatever their preferred term) is beyond our concepts since it is always alive and on the move. Our rightful comportment to nature is not one of exploitation but, instead, deep reverence.

As opposed to this, the Promethean stresses the nullity of nature. Being is less than nothing and can be rearranged to suit the desires of a strong, creative will. Reverence is a holdover of slave morality, and even the “Truth” is no barrier to the hyperstitial imagination.

Nonetheless, these seemingly opposed ideologies (when taken to their logical extreme) find a surprising identity in one another. This culminates in a common anti-humanism, where the human being is always a burden or “drag” on some valorized, superior other (whether this be the Earth or A.I.).

But underneath this shared anti-humanism is a more basic coincidence of metaphysical and ethical positions. It is to these coincidences that we now turn.

Nominalism Is a Noumenalism

Both the Gaian and the Promethean reject the a priori in the traditional sense. They deny that there are any objective, universal standards of knowledge which exist apart from our specific experiences or scientific methods. One way or another, the accelerationist and the eco-pessimist affirm a basically improvisational concept of knowledge formation. Norms of knowing are either generated through our own investigations, or else arise spontaneously from matter itself.