Abstract This study takes seriously Octavia Butler’s Parable series as an unfinished treatise of processual social philosophy. My analysis highlights Butler’s skillful weaving of a wide range of processual traditions, from the mystical atheism in the Chinese classic Daodejing , to the kinship worldview in Africana processual-relational ontologies, to the practice of relational nondomination inspired by womanist philosophies. It further demonstrates how Butler’s art of storytelling enfleshes this philosophy of relational nondomination into a collaborative, decentralized liberation movement: by inventing a fictional religion, Earthseed, Butler formulates a processual atheist theology that unshackles human imagination from the substance metaphysics–informed question of how to build a better society with flawed building blocks such as selfish human beings or selfish genes. In doing so, Butler’s processual social philosophy raises a paradigm-shifting inquiry: how to build a friendlier future with new patterns of collective actions, relations, and organizations despite flawed human beings. After all, if nature selects not only genomes or biological individuals but also relations or holobionts, then Butler’s social evolutionary theory encourages us as humans to self-select into new patterned relationalities among ourselves and our lifeworlds. Simultaneously, Butler skillfully assembles what Brook Ziporyn terms “compensatory” and “emulative” atheisms. The Books of the Living (a collection of opening verses from the chapters of the Parable series), as the seed of an atheist experiment, has the concrete yet conditional purpose to cohere people—that is, to start Earthseed in other solar systems. It likewise enacts a global mimesis of purposelessness—a self-conscious masking of its ontological indeterminacy as an open-ended interstellar travel adventure and a womanist story of how humans can leave the nest and grow up to break the cycle of violence and domination and start a new cycle of noncoercive co-becoming. This atheist experiment calls into being a Buddhish womanist subjectivity of nonduality-cum-nondomination, reconceiving of subjectivity and agency as an emergent phenomenon interconditioned among an infinite yet dynamic network of human and nonhuman, sentient and non-sentient factors. The Parable series convinces readers the truth of its philosophical insight and the viability of its vision through the art of storytelling and thereby has initiated many cautious yet hopeful collaborative liberation movements intending to lead humanity out of the dualistic epistemic trap of “either we need ‘more God’ or ‘less religion’,” which Ziporyn identifies as a dilemma endemic to academic conversations. By taking seriously the Parable series as a philosophical treatise, this study contributes to two trends shaping a broader effort: first, to decenter academia as the main site for doing philosophy; and second, to turn to relational-processual ontology in quantum physics, biology, feminist anthropology, and social justice organizing by opening a new subfield—processual social ontology.
Jessica Zu (Sat,) studied this question.