A Plural Nomos: Law, Life, and Knowledge

Abstract Even in its limited state-based form, human law owes its existence to the natural physical world with its self-created value systems. What is understood as human law is grounded in human-nonhuman entanglements, themselves a subset of a multi-dimensional natural nomos consisting of the intricately connected normative worlds of animals, plants, earth, and cosmos. Complex and intersecting plural normative fields include those associated with the nonliving world, the multiple ontological worlds produced by life forms, and the many strata of human becoming – cultural, cognitive, social, and representational. As plural the nomos contains many irreducible dimensions. Normative fields intersect, hybridise, and clash; they can mutually strengthen and also negate other normativities. In this article, I set out and explore some dimensions of the plural nomos with a focus on living beings, notably the connectedness of being, knowing and normativity. The living nomos co-emerges with being and with the embodied knowledge of even the simplest forms of life. Life is both cognitive and normative; living beings inherit ancestral norms but, in living and adapting, life creates new norms, biological, cultural, and behavioural. The living-knowing being is always normative – produced by the norming processes and constraints of life and matter at large. Normative elements are a critical part of the ontological and epistemological embeddedness of human beings in more than human worlds. Before law (or knowledge) can be about life, it is also of or from life. Expanding the analytical frame of law in this way is one method by which we might reshape western narratives of law, with the aims of promoting better openness to First Nations laws, discouraging western cultural superiority and human exceptionalism, and moving toward a more eco-sensitive view of the continuity between human law-culture-society and the natural world.