Biosphere and Constitution

The Biosphere and Constitution series examines the foundational relationship between constitutional thought and the ecological conditions of human existence. It approaches legal systems not merely as institutional and political structures, but as cultural, linguistic, and cognitive forms that arise within – and must remain coherent with – the regularities of the Biosphere. Integrating comparative constitutional law, philosophy, semiotics, biology, and complexity sciences, the series advances a new paradigm of biospheric constitutionalism devoted to safeguarding life, fostering peace, and ensuring the long-term stability of human and natural communities.

The formation of legal systems, from the dawn of human civilizations, has taken place with the aim of protecting the manifestations of the existence of human societies, starting with life itself. The development of human self-awareness first led to the realization that our life is part of a larger Life, that of the world in which we live.

The people of early antiquity performed the first acts of interpretation, recognizing a parallel between a fundamental will, which moved the elements, ensured the return of the seasons, animals, and fruits, and their own will. From this basic awareness that their life was individualized – because individual was their being and individual were its needs – they understood that this life was embedded in various levels of other manifestations of Life. First, there was the surrounding world, seen as a totality and as an envelope of many different essences. Then, there was the community, especially the basic social one, through which the life of the species could continue.

The intuition of the existence of a possible isomorphism between the envelope of essences and principles observed in the world and that of communal life – starting from the circle around which they sat to warm themselves and discuss – is the primary intuition that has founded the entire science of law and politics. It is a science because it attempts to maintain those stable relationships and enduring values within the human community, even amidst constant transformation, which they observed in Life, starting from the celestial sphere above them, the waters surrounding them, and the terrestrial spaces on which they lived.

It is a science also because it seeks to identify general relationships in the surrounding world, through which Life manifests and reproduces, and tries to adapt them to communal life. In this interpretive effort, ritual, recognition of the other, mutual care, play, and organization have a fundamental role. The transition from the ethological to the ethical occurs through the search for a constant analogy with the balance of nature. It moves from the intuition of a structural similarity between the complex circle of Life and the life of one’s own community to the search for an efficient analogy.

Thus, we move from the intuition that one lives within Nature and must conform to its many manifestations to survive, to the idea that it is possible to create human relationships that, while reproducing natural ones, conform to what is felt as specific to their community. We proceed from sensing an isomorphism between the human community and nature to constructing a homeomorphism, or a topological analogy. Hence the need to compare these two constructs: that of nature, which we try to approach, and that of society, which manifests in history and lives in law.

From this necessity arose the study of what is auspicious and what appears inauspicious at a given moment, through the interpretation of signs from the surrounding world and their analysis after events. Hence the evaluation and feedback, ranging from forms such as the sacrifice of the sovereign to revolution, government transformation, or recording the progress made in governing the community and the State, leading to the formulation of constitutional principles.

The fundamental problem of public law today becomes critically observing the relationship between the homeostasis of the surrounding world and the order of human societies. The study of the regularities of the biosphere, the study of nature as a bearer of its own mode of life, symbiosis as an evolutionary principle, the development of symbolic language, the protection of the freedom to interpret the existence of the world, the reflection on exosomatic tools and their use, particularly in technological societies, become part of the reflection on our existence in the Life of the Biosphere and in law, in the legal order.

This series thus aims to develop interdisciplinary reflections based on this foundation, serving as a basis and necessary complement to the reflection on the constitution as the fundamental discipline of legal systems conscious of their existence in the biosphere. It emphasizes that their fundamental task is to ensure their actions do not permanently compromise its regularities. In this effort, I thus try to encourage the search for the humanity of law.

In this series, the central problem – namely, the protection of Life in all its forms, as indicated in the title of the first volume – concerns both the protection of the Biosphere and Constitutionalism understood as a discourse on the indispensable nature of constitutions in the life of human communities. Consequently, Constitutionalism is also called upon to account for the relations between humanity and Nature.

For this reason, whenever I refer to Life understood as a cosmic phenomenon; to the Biosphere as a whole, as the sphere that hosts Life but within which the Noosphere also develops (which I regard as the sphere in which the psychic dimension of all living beings unfolds); to the Semiosphere, in which the ensemble of discourses produced by human beings through symbolic language is manifested; and to the Technosphere, which includes the material and immaterial artefacts generated by humans – I shall write these terms with an initial capital letter.

The same applies when I refer to Constitutionalism in the sense of a discourse oriented toward realizing the conditions that allow individuals and communities, taken as a whole, to be protected in the manifestations of their existence – both in their relations with one another and in their relationship with Nature.

I also ask to be permitted to refer to Nature with an initial capital letter whenever I intend to convey its maternal dimension, as the entity within which Life manifests itself and bestows its gifts upon us.