Naturalism and the Human Condition

Against Scientism

Frederick A. Olafson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134527489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Naturalism and the Human Condition is a compelling account of why naturalism, or the 'scientific world-view' cannot provide a full account of who and what we are as human beings.
Drawing on sources including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, Olafson exposes the limits of naturalism and stresses the importance of serious philosophical investigation of human nature.

1
Naturalism in Historical Perspective

I

The idea of nature has figured prominently in the efforts human beings have made to understand themselves. Sometimes it has done so as a conception of what we ourselves really are and, sometimes, of what we are not. In a kind of compromise between these two views, “nature” has also been conceived as an ideal to which our lives are to be conformed. This was the teaching of the Stoics, but, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, it seems to postulate, first, a distinction between nature and human nature and then makes the former a norm for the latter.¹ Inevitably, one wonders why, if there is this difference between the two, the human should conform itself to the non-human. If, on the other hand, we really are part of nature, how does it come about that we can (and often do) live “un-naturally”? May this “failure” on our part not be susceptible of another interpretation? Perhaps we are not just unusually perverse members of the natural order, but rather, in certain significant respects, do not belong there at all. There is, evidently, a prior question here about where, in the wider scheme of things, we do belong. That is also a question I want to address in this book.

Whether we are a part of nature or not depends, of course, on how the idea of nature is itself construed. Unfortunately, precision and stability of meaning have not been very common in discussions of this topic. The nature of the Stoics was a highly moralized affair and by no means like the nature that was described in the last century as being “red in tooth and claw.” Then there is the nature that is now conceived in terms of molecules and atoms and subatomic particles. And even before science or philosophy made its appearance on the historical scene, the place of human beings in the world had been the theme of myth. There were stories in which the earth was the mother from whom we are all descended; and others in which a male sky god appears to have represented something like a transcendence of these earthy beginnings. But when it comes to delimiting the concept of nature, the most crucial issue has to do with the status of non-human animals. They are almost always held to belong to nature even if human beings do not. But if the basis for this distinction was once thought to be unproblematic, that is certainly no longer the case. Even so, there are still many people who would be indignant at the suggestion that human beings are part of the natural order in just the same way as are “the beasts of the field.”

In the history of thinking about these matters, the intellectual and moral powers of human beings have been held to distinguish us from other living creatures. Even today, when nature is typically understood as a system of material entities and processes that is governed by invariant laws and indifferent to human purposes and values, it is evidently these powers that enable us to conceive nature as just such a prior, independent order and thereby, arguably, give us a special status. Another reason for asserting the distinctness of human beings from the natural world has been the fact that although we are obviously dependent in countless ways on the nature in which our lives are embedded and against which we are often helpless to defend ourselves, we are also able to intervene in natural processes and harness them to our own purposes to a much greater degree than other animals are. This fact about us may even have inspired, at least in part, the view that represents human beings as a special creation—in his “image and likeness”—of a God who is certainly not part of nature and is supposed to have set man over nature as a kind of ruler.

The idea that human beings are in nature as its rulers and that their true affinities are with a quite different sphere of reality has also had its critics. Some of these have been motivated by a perception of the mess we appear to have made of our supposed stewardship over the earth. Both before and after Rousseau, there have been thinkers who have taken a more skeptical view of the great work of civilization that human beings have claimed to be carrying out by intervening in the natural order. Such critics have reserved their admiration for those societies that have changed their environments only minimally. The broad implication of this kind of critique is that we humans should accept a quite modest place within nature and stop deluding ourselves with thoughts of some exceptional vocation that has been assigned to us.

Nevertheless, the main philosophical tradition in the West has persisted in defending the idea of such an exceptional status for human beings. As already noted, the special character of the human mind, especially as it has been interpreted in the thought of such modern philosophers as Descartes and Kant, as well as Hegel and Husserl, has been thought to justify that status. As the ultimate ground of human culture in all its forms, including the sciences of nature, mind has appeared to be proof against all attempts to reduce it to the status of a by-product of natural processes. Even when the wider syntheses proposed by these philosophers have gone down before critical attacks, the privileged position of “consciousness”—the term most frequently used to designate the defining function of the human mind—has typically survived even though its relation to the natural order has remained anomalous.

In our century, however, a quite different line of thought has developed that questions the idea that human beings cannot be assigned the status of creatures of the natural world. In a sense, it is linked to the very technologies that have made it possible for us to turn the natural world into our workshop to a far greater extent than ever before in human history. If these technologies have given us our sense of being the masters of, if not the universe, at least the natural world in our neighborhood, they also contribute to another quite different conception of our nature and status. These technologies are now closely linked with what are called the sciences of nature; and the methods of inquiry of the latter have achieved the status of paradigms of knowledge generally. By comparison, the kind of knowledge that human beings have traditionally accumulated of their own “natures,” as well as the moral and teleological terms in which this knowledge has typically been cast, have come to seem both fragmentary and feeble. Inevitably, the idea took shape that “real” inquiry into the controlling regularities of human life must proceed in accordance with the methodologies of the natural sciences. The progress that was made in medicine and in the physiology of the human body offered strong confirmation of this line of thought. It has gradually been extended into other areas that had been thought to be the province of the soul or the mind and thus not physical or “natural” in the way that, say, the circulation of the blood is. As a result we now live in a world in which systematic inquiries into our social and mental/emotional nature have achieved widespread acceptance and are brought under the rubric of “science” as “social” and “human” sciences.

The paradox inherent in these developments has not passed unnoticed. All of our efforts to make ourselves masters of our situation in the natural world have proceeded under the auspices of what is still commonly referred to as the Enlightenment. This was the movement of critical thought in the eighteenth century that, on the basis of the scientific revolution of the preceding century, undertook a searching critique of the religious and metaphysical underpinnings of the Christian civilization of Europe. The great natural philosophers of the seventeenth century had shown that nature can be conceived in mathematical terms that altogether bypass the teleological ordering envisaged by Aristotle. The idea of the Enlightenment philosophes was that scientific methods of comparable exactitude could be brought to bear on human life and on human institutions and practices that had traditionally been protected against critical scrutiny by the veil of Christian myth. The comprehensive program of demystification and secularization thus initiated was to become the agenda of liberal political movements throughout the Western world and beyond it as well.

The paradox generated by this conception, which was to shape the modern world in very significant ways, consists in the fact that the methods of inquiry that had been designed to deal with inanimate nature—that is, with things— were to be applied to the human beings who were the authors of this project.² This is what has been called the “dialectic of enlightenment” by which people are denied any status that sets them apart from the natural world that they have already reduced to a system of objects. The implications of this new status, especially for the ethical dimension of our relation to one another, are obviously very considerable. But once this great engine of scientific inquiry and rational administration had been set in motion, it proved almost impossible to stop it or to modify its procedures even when the fit between them and the situations to which they are applied becomes more than a little problematic.

Not surprisingly, there has been a reaction to the vision of human life thus generated. Since Max Weber, it has become customary to speak of the “dis-enchantment” of the world that these rationalizing procedures have brought about. What this term expresses is a sense that the interest—most notably, the appeal to the imagination—of the world as so conceived has been radically diminished. It is certainly true that a world in which we are not the masters, even in principle, and are instead at the mercy of beings and powers over which we have little or no control, is likely to be more interesting, often in a quite scary way, than one in which everything is held to be explainable and predictable. The old saying that Vico quotes—homo non intelligendo fit omnia (freely: by virtue of not understanding the world around him, man himself becomes the model on which all things are interpreted)—reminds us of a time when human beings had only themselves and, more specifically, their purposes and the fears and hopes associated with them as a model on which to interpret the world around them. In those circumstances, it was not arrogance or pride, but the lack of an alternative that led people to read these same hopes and fears into a natural world that we now think of as being utterly indifferent to them. We also know what an extraordinary corpus of stories and images the Greeks and other peoples elaborated in the state of Urdummheit that supposedly preceded the emergence of a rational and ultimately scientific world-view. It is hard not to wish that a walk in the woods could be as magical an experience for us as it evidently was for them. But, in the words of W.B. Yeats, “the woods of Arcady are dead and over is their antique joy”; or so it is now widely and regretfully felt.

II

The philosophical controversies to which all these developments have given rise set the context for the theme of this study. That theme is naturalism—a movement of thought that not only takes its name from “nature” but assigns an unqualifiedly positive valence to the fact of our being part of nature. In the tradition of the Enlightenment from which it is itself descended, naturalism was originally a reaction against religious ideas of a supernatural domain to which human beings were supposed to be somehow akin. It was also directed against philosophical systems like idealism that were thought to have much too strong an affinity with a religious view of the world and to do scant justice to the role in our lives of the natural world into which we are born.

Naturalism as a movement of opposition to these systems of belief also came to be associated, in the thought of a philosopher like John Dewey, with the kind of social liberalism that sought, early in this century, to open up new horizons of thought and practice. Religious and social orthodoxies, by contrast, were identified with constraints that in one way or another block a full development of natural human powers and potentialities for self-realization. As a result, naturalism came to be understood as a liberation from the dogmas of supernaturalism and the conservative social order for which they served as an ideology, as well as a declaration of independence for scientific inquiry into the nature of the world and also into human nature.

Beyond these very general affinities, however, this kind of naturalism rarely committed itself to philosophical theses that characterized nature in a way that really made clear what it could and could not comprise. Certainly, it would be hard to gather from Dewey’s writings, for all their pro-science orientation, whether the ontology or conception of reality espoused by the natural sciences was implicit in naturalism as he understood it, and if not, why not. In any case, after Dewey’s death in 1952, the appeal to philosophers of the term “naturalism,” as well as the appeal of the rhetoric associated with it, appeared to fall off quite substantially. This was certainly not because the supernatural or the spiritual held some new attraction for them. The reason is more likely to have been that the expanding role, within philosophy, of logic and the logical analysis of language tended to turn philosophers away from an interest in the “nature of things” in the old comprehensive sense. That, it came to be thought, was someone else’s business. Although this “someone else” was generally held to be the natural scientist, the work of philosophy was conceived as the clarification of the conceptual and logical preconditions for anything we might claim to know about the world. As such, it was supposed to be largely independent of the work of the various scientific disciplines.

More recently, however, naturalism has reappeared in the purlieus of American philosophy and it has done so in a new guise. Philosophers have been trying to make common cause with science for some time now, perhaps on the policy of “If you can’t beat them, join them.” As a result, they no longer show as much interest in abstaining from first-order pronouncements about the nature of things as they did when language was their principal theme. It is not uncommon now to hear philosophers describe their work as being not so much preliminary to, as more or less directly continuous with, that of the natural sciences. With this sense of a direct convergence of purpose between science and philosophy, there has come a revival of the slogans of naturalism. The older naturalism certainly identified itself with science and the scientific world-view; but, as has already been noted, the terms of its allegiance were rather vague and had more to do with using science to put other competing world-views out of business than it did with any precise ontological commitment. Now, however, these rival positions are pretty well defunct and their philosophical theses no longer command real interest, so a struggle against them would be unlikely to stir much interest.

What is of great significance for this study is that, during this hiatus in the public sponsorship of naturalism, its philosophical promoters have, for reasons that will need examining, reformulated naturalism as an all-embracing materialism or “physicalism,” as it is now more often called. There is no longer any room for saving ambiguities like the concepts of “experience” and the “psycho-physical” that were still coin of the realm in the older naturalism. These were part of the residue of the empiricism from which it had not yet clearly distinguished itself. As a result, for a contemporary naturalist the only conceptual system in terms of which the world-process can be reliably characterized is held to be that of the physical sciences of nature. On such a view, the world and nature are one and the same and everything in them is of the same ontological type.

The kind of naturalism that has developed in the last few decades is significantly different in a number of respects from the classical materialism of a Democritus or a Hobbes. Democritus simply asserted that everything was particulate matter moving in the void and Hobbes was equally direct in the claims he made about the physical character of mental processes like sensation. This kind of flat-footed naturalism now seems crude to most philosophers. They have had to fight battles against other philosophical traditions that stem from Descartes and Kant and they are incomparably more sophisticated than their predecessors when it comes to working out strategies of argument to defeat the claims of these and other non-naturalistic thinkers. In all of this, a philosophical interest in language, informed in good part by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, has played a major role.

Even with all these new currents of thought, the rhetoric of this renewal of naturalism remains pretty much the same as it was in the past. The message is still that we humans are part of nature—creatures of the natural world, through and through. The trouble with this thesis has always been not so much what it affirmed—the obvious similarities between human beings and other denizens of the sublunary world—as what it was intended to deny. This was the idea that there could be any deep ontological differences among the kinds of entities, ourselves included, that in one way or another, can be said to be “in the world.” Every half-way emphatic suggestion to that effect has been treated by the proponents of naturalism as a reversion to the religious ideas of an otherworldly kind that they most wanted to discredit. Although that goal would not seem to require that everything that is in some sense a part of the natural world be in it in just the same way, that is what naturalism does require when its hostility to anything that smacks of the supernatural evolves into an express ontological requirement that our lives and our actions and we ourselves be conceived in physicalistic terms.

It is this development within naturalism that has transformed it from a rather vague rhetorical stance into an uncompromising thesis that has become widely influential within American philosophy. It is hardly too much to say that in this guise naturalism has become a kind of all-purpose philosophy for those who think the natural sciences can provide answers to all the problems with which philosophers have traditionally tormented themselves or at least to the ones that do not simply dissolve on closer inspection. So convinced of its truth are the sponsors of this thesis that they have great difficulty crediting the idea that there is any alternative to it that deserves to be taken seriously and is not just a shameless reversion to the superstitions of the past.

I will refer to this position as “hard” naturalism and to the older kind whose principal interest was in anti-supernaturalism as “soft” naturalism. (When the term used is simply “naturalism,” it will denote hard naturalism unless otherwise indicated.) The broader import of the movement from one to the other is still not well understood even by many of its proponents and certainly not by the wider educated public that might be expected to take an interest in such developments. As a result, the assumption remains largely undisturbed that naturalism still constitutes a principal element in the intellectual armory of thoughtful people of progressive and liberal temperament. We tend—rather wishfully—to assume that that other set of intellectual and moral interests that we call “the humanities” can co-exist with this radicalization of naturalism as the ultimate set of postulates in terms of which a “theory of everything” is to be formulated. We have been assured, after all, by C.P. Snow that the party of science has “the future in its bones.” How, then, can there even be thought to be any serious alternatives to naturalism as the philosophical standpoint from which we are to understand ourselves and our world?

This book will challenge all these assumptions. It will do so by showing, first, that the argumentation by which naturalism in its physicalistic incarnation has tried to demonstrate its validity is faulty. Not even the prestige of “Science,” I will claim, can carry the day for philosophical theses that are as deeply and perversely paradoxical as those of this transformed naturalism prove to be on closer inspection. But, beyond this critique of naturalism, I will show that there are alternatives for thinking about the human condition other than those that are recognized by naturalists. In doing so, I will resist the established presumption that any critique of naturalism must try to reach out beyond the limits of anything we can put to an empirical test and postulate a form of reality that is, in the fallen sense of that much put-upon word, “metaphysical.” Instead, my claim will be that, instead of venturing into unknown realms, we need to take a second and closer look at certain matters that are so familiar to us that we tend to think we already understand them as well as anyone possibly could. In a way, it is true that we have such an understanding, but it is largely inarticulate and certainly does not find its way into the theories of the world and of human nature that dominate our intellectual life. Getting at that understanding and the ways in which it has been overlaid both by naturalism and earlier by the conceptions of the mind that naturalism attacked will be a major task of this book. If that can be done, it will also become clear how different the world we live in and we ourselves are from the standard accounts that both science and philosophy have given of such matters.

In drawing a distinction between the “soft” and the “hard” versions of naturalism and addressing this study to the latter rather than to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• 1 Naturalism in historical perspective
• 2 Naturalism, dualism, and the natural attitude
• 3 The rejection of the given and the eclipse of presence
• 4 The substitution of language for presence: or words as things
• 5 What does the brain do?
• 6 Human being as the place of truth
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index