What Might Simondon Say About Gaia: Ontogenesis of Gaia
Rather than beginning from already constituted entities or stable essences, Simondon proposes that individuation must be understood as an ontogenetic process through which beings emerge from metastable fields full of potentials. Ontogenesis designates precisely this movement: the passage from a preindividual state of unresolved tensions toward relatively stabilized forms. The preindividual, in Simondon’s sense, is not a chaotic nothingness but a charged and supersaturated field of reality, characterized by incompatible potentials that have not yet been resolved into individuated structures. As he writes, “being” must be understood “not as a substance, matter, or form, but as a charged and supersaturated system” (Simondon 2009: 6).
Individuation occurs when previously incompatible orders of magnitude enter into communication within such a metastable field. This communication does not presuppose pre-given individuals; rather, it produces them as temporary resolutions of internal tensions. What emerges is not a substance but a phase of being, a provisional stabilization of ongoing processes. In this sense, individuation is always partial and ongoing: it does not eliminate the preindividual but redistributes it within newly formed structures.
From this perspective, the genesis of a planet can be understood as a paradigmatic case of ontogenesis. A planetary system does not simply exist as a completed object; it emerges through the mediation of heterogeneous scales of reality: cosmic, geological, chemical, and atmospheric. Solar energy, for instance, does not merely act upon an already formed Earth but participates in the continuous organization of its chemical and biological processes, including the emergence of photosynthetic life. The planet is thus not a background for life but a site of ongoing co-individuation between nonliving and living processes.
Simondon’s distinction between physical and vital individuation further clarifies this point. Physical individuation tends toward relatively stable forms in which energy gradients are largely resolved, whereas vital individuation preserves a higher degree of metastability, allowing living beings to maintain and transform their own conditions of existence. However, this distinction should not be understood as an ontological divide. As Simondon insists, there is no substantial separation between the physical and the vital; they differ only in mode of organization and degree of metastability, not in-being-itself (Simondon 2020: 323). Life is not the negation of physical processes but a continuation of individuation under conditions of heightened internal complexity.
What follows from this is crucial for thinking Gaia: the preindividual is not exhausted by any particular form of individuation. It persists as the reservoir of unresolved potentials within and across individuated beings. Every individuation both resolves and redistributes this preindividual field without eliminating it. The milieu is therefore not external to beings but immanent to their ongoing formation.
Understood in this way, Gaia can be approached as a planetary regime of co-individuation in which physical, biological, and technical processes remain continuously entangled. Gaia is not a higher-order organism, nor a unifying subject of the Earth, but the name for a metastable planetary field in which individuation operates across multiple scales without final resolution. It is, in Simondonian terms, an individuation that has not closed upon itself.
This also complicates certain anthropological readings of collectivity, such as Paolo Virno’s concept of the “common” as a shared reservoir of human potentiality. From a Simondonian-Gaian perspective, the preindividual cannot be restricted to human cognitive or linguistic capacities. It is not a specifically human commons but a transversal field of material and energetic potentials that exceeds any anthropocentric framing. The common, in this sense, is not primarily a space of human production but a condition of planetary individuation in which humans participate alongside innumerable nonhuman processes.
Gaia, then, is not a metaphysical totality or a holistic system, but the ongoing ontogenesis of a planet that remains structurally open: a field in which individuation never ceases, and in which the distinction between living and nonliving is itself an effect of relational stabilization rather than a foundational divide.
Instead of Conclusion: Nature in Plural
Throughout this paper, I have developed a reading of Gaia through Simondon’s theory of individuation in order to displace the assumption that “nature” and “humanity” constitute separate ontological domains. For Simondon, the very category of the “anthropological” is problematic insofar as it presupposes a stable essence of the human detached from the processes of life, matter, and technicity that continuously produce it. In contrast to the dominant humanist frameworks of mid-twentieth-century French thought—whether psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity or Marxist accounts of social determination—Simondon proposes an ontology grounded in ontogenesis, understood as the continuous production of individuals through transductive relations across physical, psychic, social, and technical domains.
From this perspective, there is no fixed human nature. What we call “humanity” is better understood as a metastable field of individuation, traversed by thresholds, transitions, and ongoing reorganizations. Individuation does not begin with the human; rather, the human emerges within a broader inhuman milieu that precedes and exceeds it. This does not eliminate human specificity, but it situates that specificity within a continuum of physical and biological processes in which individuation operates at multiple scales without a privileged center.
Read through this Simondonian lens, Gaia cannot be reduced either to a unified natural system governed by invariant laws or to a cultural projection imposed upon nature. Instead, Gaia names a planetary process in which heterogeneous regimes of individuation—geological, biological, climatic, technological—remain continuously entangled. The apparent opposition between nature and culture dissolves once both are understood as outcomes of co-individuating processes rather than as pre-given domains. What appears as “nature” is already historically and technically mediated; what appears as “culture” is already materially and ecologically embedded.
In this sense, the contrast between singular natural systems and plural cultural formations, often emphasized in modern epistemology, becomes less decisive. As Latour suggests, the modern distinction between nature and culture cannot be maintained once the Earth itself is understood as an active participant in the production of historical conditions. The Earth is neither a neutral background nor a singular object of knowledge but a field of discontinuous and interacting processes that resist unification under a single explanatory framework.
What emerges, then, is not a reconciliation between nature and culture, but the recognition that both terms refer to different stabilizations within a broader process of planetary individuation. Gaia is this process insofar as it expresses the ongoing co-formation of living and nonliving systems without final synthesis. It is not a totality, but a multiplicity of individuations that remain open, incomplete, and relationally constituted.
From this standpoint, “nature” must be understood in the plural—not as a collection of separate environments or systems, but as the name for the continuous variation of ontogenetic processes across scales. Simondon’s ontology, extended through Gaia theory, thus leads not to a final reconciliation of categories, but to their systematic destabilization in favor of a more fundamental reality: the ongoing individuation of a planet that has no final form.
Bibliography
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2: 197–222.
Clarke, Bruce, and Dutreuil, Sébastien, eds. Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, 2012.
Gribbin, John, and Mary Gribbin. James Lovelock: in search of Gaia. Princeton University Press, 2009.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The incorporeal: Ontology, ethics, and the limits of materialism. Columbia University Press, 2017.
Harding, Stephan. Animate earth: Science, intuition and Gaia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
Lenton, Timothy. Earth system science: a very short introduction. Vol. 464. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lovelock, James. The revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is fighting back and how we can still save humanity. Vol. 36. Penguin UK, 2007.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. What is life?. Univ of California Press, 2000.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso Books, 2015.
Moore, Jason W., ed. Anthropocene or capitalocene?: Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. Pm Press, 2016.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. "The automaton of the Anthropocene: On carbosilicon machines and cyberfossil capital." South Atlantic Quarterly 116.2 (2017): 311-326.
Serres, Michel. The parasite. Minnesota University Press, 2007.
Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in light of notions of form and information. Minnesota University Press, 2020.
Simondon, Gilbert. "The position of the problem of ontogenesis." Parrhesia 7.1 (2009): 4-16.
Stengers, Isabelle. Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
Stengers, Isabelle. "Autonomy and the Intrusion of Gaia." South Atlantic Quarterly 116.2 (2017): 381-400.
Stengers, Isabelle. Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Trans. Andrew Goffey. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press / meson press, 2015.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Tola, Miriam. "Species, nature, and the politics of the common: From Virno to Simondon." South Atlantic Quarterly 116.2 (2017): 237-255.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Virno, Paolo. 2009. “Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon.” Translated by Nick Heron. Parrhesia, no. 7: 58–67.
Ward, Peter. The Medea Hypothesis: is life on earth ultimately self-destructive?. Princeton University Press, 2009.
Zalasiewicz, Jan. The planet in a pebble: A journey into earth's deep history. Oxford University Press, 2012.