Extreme ontologies and the limits of science

* Filip Maric, Associate Professor, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1265-6205. Contact: filip.maric@uit.no

** Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Associate Professor, UiO University of Oslo, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5218-1462

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There is a common assumption that more knowledge about the world, its ecosystems and biodiversity will inspire greater efforts toward preservation and conservation (Panieri et al., 2025). While this may be true to some extent, a thorough study of the history of the natural sciences will likely reveal that this is only a very partial account. Indeed, resource extraction at any scale would never have been possible without increased knowledge about the resources in question alongside their potential use value. This knowledge, in turn, has commonly been accumulated and increased thanks to progressive technoscientific innovation that has brought previously remote or extreme environments ever closer to the scientific gaze and extractive grasp of human hands and their technological extensions.

In simple terms, it is the same scientific knowledge that is arguably meant to inspire awe and consequent preservation that has also underpinned and driven the destruction of the very same environments in question. The moment an entity or ecosystem enters the remit of knowledge and science, it loses its extremities by virtue of becoming known and so liable to control and manipulation. It begs the question, then, if there is not another story to be told, or at least explored, about our relationship with extreme environments, and another way of relating to them than our usual scientific approach.

The history of philosophy is replete with attempts to describe and advance a different relationship with the world, even if its advances have had little bearing on the indomitable march of the natural sciences. To account for and summarise all of this is a Sisyphean task at the best of times, not least given the rapid advances and diversification in philosophical discourses. Instead of trying to provide this summary, we will merely point out a few thoughts that appear of particular interest as researchers inclined to think with philosophy who suddenly come in contact with even just the notion of extreme environments.

The first thought, then, is championed by recent work in speculative realism, though it has found a variety of iterations across many times and cultures. It is the idea that everything that exists in the world, whether this be a rock, a song, a bird, an ecosystem, a car-key, milkshake, praying mantis, idea, or else, has some certain aspect (or, facet, environment,…) to it that cannot be known, that withdraws, and will forever remain unknowable (Harman, 2018; Kleinherenbrink, 2019). Thus understood, extreme environments are an inherent part of, or interior to, everything that exists while simultaneously forever being exterior to knowledge. They are extreme not because they are distant but because they are exterior to knowledge.

In this sense, then, the study of extreme environments is no special scientific interest and even less so a geographical one. Rather, it is something akin to the shadow of the study of all and anything, always there, yet always out of reach. The disturbing and perpetual reminder of the limits of science (including the social sciences).  

Evidently, this raises the question of what we are to do with such an idea. In the context of science, this should be a relatively disconcerting thought in virtually direct opposition to the usual scientific spirit that predominantly marches forward based on the assumption that everything can, indeed, be known, if only we pursue this knowledge long enough. Though science does acknowledge certain limits, these are generally understood as temporary while the chase for knowledge and even a theory of everything continues. So, what if the seemingly inexorable march of science is a dead end in the exploration of extreme environments?

In the context of speculative realism, the notion of the withdrawn, extreme aspect of everything sits within the context of a revision of ontology, the philosophical study of being. In particular, it sits within the context of the search for an ontology that is no longer centred on human exceptionalism (or anthropocentrism), in which the human sits above and beyond or in the centre of all other existence. By showing that everything that exists has the very same characteristics (parts, environments, facets,…), of which the extreme in the present sense is one, the point is made that nothing stands above anything else, ontologically speaking. This perspective also gives rise to some terms that have been of interest in recent philosophy, including the notion of flat ontology(Bryant, 2011) and posthumanism (Wolfe, 2009). 

One ethico-political consequence of posthumanism and flat ontologies, if you will, is that there is no ontological justification for any person, thing, idea, president, people, or else,

to stand above anyone or anything else politically either. It should not be difficult to see how this might be a valuable line of thought, in a time in which the exaltation of some humans over others and the natural world is driving increasing social and ecological calamity. It might well be then, that one aspect of the study of (or with?) extreme environments is its being a study of all the ways that humans do not and cannot justifiably place themselves above anything or anyone, let alone control either, given their ontological uncontrollability (Rosa, 2020).

Thinking further along the ethico-political implications of extreme environments in the present sense also reminds of the work of 20th-century philosopher of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas. Though not as readily identifiable with posthumanism and its contemporaries, Levinas also argued for the unknowable, exterior, alterity, otherness, or Other as a quintessential element of (human) existence (Levinas, 1998).

To Levinas, it was the otherness of the other that was the ground of all ethics. In a crude simplification, his argument was that if everything about the other could be encompassed by knowledge, there would effectively no longer be any/thing other that we could relate to, and hence, there would also be no ethics. We would be ‘duped by morality’ (Levinas, 1969) in the discovery of ethics as an arbitrary human construction, rather than its discovery as the ontological ground of existence. That is, in the discovery of extreme environments, as that which can never be known, as the foundation of ethics.

For Levinas, the ethico-political consequence of this ontological (or metaphysical as he prefered to argue) realisation is that our ethical responsibility is, quintessentially, to always preserve the otherness and unknowability of the other, to resist the all-encompassing grasp of knowledge and science (Maric & Nicholls, 2020). This notion is as contrary to common approaches to the study of extreme environments and associated ideas of conservation and preservation as can be. It suggests that all of our endeavours to unearth further knowledge about extreme environments and make them known might, in fact, be unethical, undermining the very ground for these environments to be and remain extreme. It also suggests that what conservation and preservation require is not more knowledge but greater appreciation of the value of the unknown, and our ethical responsibility for preserving it as unknown and unknowable; a rather otherwise turn for what might come to figure as the speciality field of extreme environment studies.

There is another, resonant line of thought that has the potential to underscore the ethical pitfalls of increasing knowledge about extreme environments and point us in the direction of an otherwise science for extreme environments. The starting point for this might be that every extraction of environments from the extreme(s of their unknown) brings about a certain foreclosure of imagination, fantasy, and fiction about the same. Simply put, if we make something (fully) known, there is no longer a need nor reasonable justification to imagine much about it.

Granted, increased knowledge also has a long history of sparking a certain kind of imagination that only becomes possible with the acquisition of new knowledge. But I wonder whether a thorough look into this might not reveal that the imagination liberated by knowledge is mostly a kind of utilitarian imagination about what becomes possible with this new knowledge (technological innovation would be the prime example of this), as opposed to an imagination about the unknown as such.

It might turn out, then, that cautionary tales about unknown environments and the monsters and dangers within them have long had the function of contributing to their conservation and preservation by way of keeping people away from them, of calibrating the number of people who would venture there, or engender more respectful engagement with them (never quite without also the obverse effects). Imagination of unknown utopias, in turn, has likely always had the role of alerting people of the existence of possibilities that are different and maybe better than their current conditions and inspiring action towards the same.

Outside of these external functions, imagination might also have some kind of intrinsic value (or function), as imagination, and its ubiquity across human history at least suggests as much. But for it to continue to be a viable praxis, it depends entirely on the perpetual preservation of the unknown and forever unknowable. Might it be, then, that a central facet of a future science of extreme environments lies in science fiction, speculative fictions, or even something like extreme futurisms, etc.? As a kind of ethical praxis of the conservation of extreme environments, of ethics itself, and of the preservation of imagination? As that urgently needed, transformative approach to ‘strengthening human-nature interconnectedness’ without the detrimental facts of orthodox knowledge production (IPBES, 2024)? And finally, as an alternative to increasing nature connectedness and consequent pro-environmental behaviours where even the common alternative via embodiment and direct exposure are out of reach (Klaniecki et al., 2018)

To be clear, even the otherwise approach that we are taking a crude bearing of here will challenges and pitfalls that need to be acknowledged and explored, for example, the risks of ‘othering’ (Rohleder, 2014) or the implications of a science fiction of the unknown in a world ‘where different knowledges continuously conflict,collide, transform, and synchronize’ (Chattopadhyay, 2016), including those that differ from science, embodied experience, or else. Notwithstanding such challenges, however, it appears to us that considering science fiction, or extreme futurisms, in the sense we have presented here, provides a novel and highly pertinent line of inquiry in the search for new, transformative approach to studying (with) extreme environments.

References

Bryant, L.R. (2011). The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press.

Chattopadhyay, B. (2016). On the Mythologerm: Kalpavigyan and the Question of Imperial Science. Science Fiction Studies, 43(3), pp. 435-458.

Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Books.

IPBES (2024). Summary for Policymakers of the Thematic Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. O’Brien, K., Garibaldi, L., Agrawal, A., Bennett, E., Biggs, O., Calderón Contreras, R., Carr, E., Frantzeskaki, N., Gosnell, H., Gurung, J., Lambertucci, S., Leventon, J., Liao, C., Reyes García, V., Shannon, L., Villasante, S., Wickson, F., Zinngrebe, Y., and Perianin, L. (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11382230

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Kleinherenbrink, A. (2019) Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press.

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.

Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or, Beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.

Maric, F. & Nicholls, D. (2020). The fundamental violence of physiotherapy: Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of ontology and its implications for physiotherapy theory and practice. Open Physio Journal. https://doi.org/http://doi.org/10.14426/art/908  

Panieri, G., Argentino, C., Savini, A. et al. (2025). Sanctuary for vulnerable Arctic species at the Borealis Mud Volcano. Nature Communications, 16, 504. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-55712-x

Rohleder, P. (2014). Othering. In Teo, T. (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (pp. 1306–1308). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_414

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