Nature - What is it?

Time for writing today! As always spontaneous first-draft stuff. 

   I would submit that there is a connection between the way our culture imagines and treats the forest that used to exist where this mining operation is today and the way we imagine and treat our own bodies, even if many of us choose not to destroy our bodies to this extent. That is kind of my theme today.

  I don’t think we can do with an Aristotelian/Thomist framework for understanding nature. The dominant understanding, the founding fathers of which are unknown Gnostics, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Newton, Hume, and Kant, namely,  that of capitalism-science-technology, has refuted itself. How so? Look at the fruits of that tree. I’ll be brief:

 

·        Destruction of countless local places

·        Global ecological crisis, risking civilization

·        Including the continuing loss of precious topsoil on a massive scale

·        Social uprooting, alienation, and deculturation on a mass scale

·        The cheapening of human life

·        The swallowing up of human community by mass society and ideological extremism

·        The rise of mind control on a mass scale

·        Extreme gaps between the richest and all others

·        Mass migrations due to war, grinding poverty, and ecological catastrophe

·        Technological threats (e.g. genetic engineering) to human nature

 

These fruits are natural to the tree, or to replace the organic metaphor with a more appropriate mechanical one – you can know the essence of industrial capitalism by all these forms of destruction and injustice. When you see the autonomy of the subject as the sole judge of what is real and good when all of nature seems dead and meaningless, raw material waiting to be exploited for profit and power, and human nature and society are seen as so much clay to be molded to accommodate the requirements of the system, then the reduction of the world follows. The autonomous self has done this. It is a function of a mechanical, indifferent, inherently meaningless nature that only becomes valuable when a price is put on it. 

. . .

     For Aristotle, meaning and value are in nature. The Thomist understanding of nature as Creation deepens that possibility. Funny though it is to find this name after Aristotle and Thomas, I believe that J. R. R. Tolkien deepened both.

 

    For Aristotle, being is intelligible. There are two distinct phenomena behind my apartment. Yet we conceive them as being two distinct instances of one kind of reality: birch trees. We conceive of or see the two objects as birch trees, which we distinguish from other kinds of trees, which we distinguish from other kinds of plants, and so on. We do this naturally, even as children, who are geniuses when it comes to recognizing analogous patterns. We can go on deepening the intelligible (analogous) patterns that make the birch trees what they are almost indefinitely.

    Aristotle breaks down our understanding of what is intelligible in nature into four aspects or layers:

1.     Essence (or Formal Cause): This is the primary aspect of what makes something what it is rather than something else. For humans, being rational and political animals captures this essence. We share a nature with other animals but our capacity to understand the world and form a world through political community distinguishes us from other animals, in particular the ones closes to us.

2.     Material Cause: This refers to the substance out of which a thing is made. For a human, this would be the physical body and its components.

3.     Efficient Cause: This is the source of the change or the agent that brings something into being. For a human, this would involve the biological processes and parents.

4.     Final Cause: This is the purpose or the end for which a thing exists. For humans, it might involve achieving eudaimonia (flourishing or well-being) through political activity.

 

So what about the beauty I see in the trees? Is that part of what makes them intelligible? Aristotle did leave space for such spiritual qualities in the so-called final cause, as an aspect of the purpose or end for which the trees exist. In perceiving the beauty of the trees and being glad of it I am not, as in modern thinking, projecting psychological wishes onto a blank screen but rather apprehending an aspect of the being of the birch trees. Or put differently, the birch trees are disclosing an aspect of their being to me, which they can do only because I am open for it, am not blind to it, to stick with the visual metaphor. This is about as far as Aristotle takes us.

 

Aquinas translates Aristotle into Christianity, deepening how we understand nature in a way. For Aristotle, meaning and purpose, intelligibility and value, were woven into nature. You can wonder how this can be. For Thomas, intelligibility meant that nature – the birch trees – has the power to imprint on our minds ideas of that which is intelligible, and ideas are a mental-spiritual quality. Ideas apart from spirit-mind (Geist) make no sense. So he gave the ideas that comprise the world a metaphysical address: the mind of God. Because these divine Ideas flowed into the Creation of the world, the world is intelligible. Even as a child when we recognize that these two objects are the same kind of thing, namely birch trees, our minds thus make contact with God’s mind. Because they were created through an idea, we can have that idea of them, though only imperfectly.

       We never understand trees as God does, of course. To the extent we understand the essence of trees, therefore, we must interpret because we lack the transparent and perfect apprehension that only the Creator has. Nevertheless, something of the Creator’s idea may be grasped by the loving and attentive mind, even as we may grasp something of a poet’s mind by a truthful understanding of his poem. The being  of the poem may be thought of as all of the good, intelligible readings of the poem over time; the being of trees perhaps in analogy as all the language, thoughts, science, and art involving trees over time – though even with an absolute view of history our collective (good) interpretations would not match the Idea of God. (I had a thought looking at our Christmas tree: if we could really grasp how wonderful every tree is, what a miracle it is, we would adore every single one like I remember adoring the Christmas trees in my life – not just as symbols of Christmas but as trees.) I am not sure why, but I think Tolkien inspired this view for me.

       Now far from being something we take for granted, the idea of Creation, and the way it was unpacked metaphysically by the likes of Aquinas, is hardly intelligible given what is taken for granted in the culture that I grew up in. Though rooted in common understandings of his time – some of which do survive into the present – the philosophical understanding of the theological idea of Creation by Aquinas represents a deepening of the concept of reality, an interpretation, a reaching out to reality in thought. [For the secular-humanist mind, God might mean nothing, or might mean a superseded fiction (analogous to Santa Claus as imagined in “Twas the Night Before Christmas”), or more charitably might mean a deep human need projected onto a cold, indifferent universe. Other ways of understanding the death of God are possible.] 

          It is not surprising then that the understanding of natural phenomena and nature itself could no longer be that of a ‘text’, of something meaningful. Of course, the philosophical thought of trees or anything else (human beings) having an essential nature became with the death of God unintelligible. As Sartre perceptively put it: There is no essence of human beings, for there is no God to have the Idea of human beings, to creatively imagine human beings into existence. For large sections of the societies I have lived in – the more educated sections – indeed the death of God and the unintelligibility of Creation have almost become something that goes without saying, especially in many areas of life including anything falling in the province of science, technology, or industrial capitalism; also in the areas of life strongly influenced by this present regime of science-technology-capitalism, including art and morals.

 

. . .

 

Thomas made another addition to Aristotle in addition to giving the intelligible structure of reality a new metaphysical address. Aquinas believed that the essence of beings does not inherently include existing. In other words, existence is a gift bestowed upon these beings, something added to their essence/intelligibility. For Aquinas, this bestowed existence is Creation – translating the essences into the material universe. God is the source of all existence.

     That which exists is good by virtue of existing. Existing is good. Not to exist bad. We recognize that emotionally more than cognitively. Through the gladness I feel I recognize the goodness of the tree. That which I recognize as good is in principle lovable to that extent. Love is at bottom the feeling-judgment: good that this exists!

    Practically speaking, it would violate the being of the birch trees just to wantonly destroy them. Their claims to exist, their goodness, is not absolute. Facing death by freezing I would be justified in cutting them down. If they became diseased and thus posed a threat to safety, it would be justified to cut them down. But to destroy them for profit, luxury consumption in the spirit of transforming valueless raw material into a use value or commodity – that would violate their very being. As we see it as a kind of sacrilege to destroy a precious work of art – say a painting of Vermeer – you can see the wanton destruction of trees (the Redwoods!) as desecrating a work of God. This is probably more Tolkien (or E. F. Schumacher) than Aquinas. But these latter thinkers and artists deepened Thomas as Thomas deepened Aristotle: by adding something that flowed from his thought.

    If people lived within this way of thinking, the world would surely be a very different – and better – place.

 

. . .

Modern scientists and philosophers cut out the essence and the final cause from Aristotle’s framework, leaving on the material and efficient causes. These were understood strictly within the framework of nature as a closed mechanical system. For Galileo, Descartes, Bacon and others, to see nature right required eliminating most of human understanding: colors, smells, sounds, emotions, values, meanings, and more. What was left was mass and force. What could be quantified and measured. What could obey the mechanical laws of the closed system. What could be predicted in advance by the right equations. Everything you need to manipulate nature technologically. That required de-meaning nature. Think of the advances for science and engineering that came from grave robbing, seeing the body of the dead not as a grieving family might see it, but as material that made no claims on a scientist’s heart. The body during an autopsy: a metaphor for nature in the modern framework.

     This was conceived very consciously in service of the project called “the conquest of nature.” Conquering and enslaving nature. Well, the slave doesn’t have much left to give. And the (unnatural) forms of life built on her enslavement will die when she gives out.

 

. . .

 

Of course, the growing power of capitalism-science-technology (industrialism) was not the only reason the modernist paradigm could replace the Aristotelian-Thomist paradigm. The Aristotelian-Thomist paradigm had been used (abused) as an ideology to justify unjust class hierarchies. It had been used to keep women down. And as discussed earlier, it had been used – and still is used in the conservation faction of the Catholic Church – to keep gay and lesbian people down. The same ideology that freed the capitalist to deforest the ancient forests of Appalachia also freed the oppressed to challenge the unjust social order keeping them down.  I have to go on with that theme tomorrow.