Meso-Metaphysics and Paradigmatic Environmental Anti-Modernism: Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth and the Rejection, and Embrace, of Metaphysical Necessity

Bruno Latour’s latest book, Down to Earth, argues that the Earth itself must “ground” philosophical modernity and provide a “ground” for thinking about globalism and the problems of the globalist agenda. In this review I find the use of the Earth, and of various other stand-ins for metaphysical principles, to be a kind of “meso-metaphysics,” a metaphysics which denies transcendence but all the same makes use of transcendence and operational otherness when needful for a given ideology, such as the radical environmentalism espoused by Bruno Latour. I see this as ultimately a rejection of both metaphysics and of the possibility of science and philosophy, as the conflation of the physical ground with a philosophical ground dooms meso-metaphysics to incoherence.