Does nature have a point?

                                        Sabine Hossenfelder

Just watched another video of physicist Youtuber Sabine Hossenfelder (link below). Mostly when scientists start trying to think philosophically, they get into trouble. They just assume that the only valid philosophy is science, that the absolute standard of rationality is the scientific method. They then proceed to draw metaphysical conclusions in the name of science. Sabine Hossenfelder is more sophisticated than most and well worth taking seriously. 

   She starts out with a quote from her favorite physicist, Steven Weinberg (1933-2021): "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." She goes on the unpack the different senses of "having a purpose" or "having a point." Some are intentional: I am writing this to try to understand or make sense of things. If the universe had this kind of purpose, there would have to be a Creator or creators. There is the sense of purpose as function: white blood cells have to purpose to fight off harmful germs, the stomach has the purpose of digesting food. And then there is the outcome of a given system, what it tends to end up doing. Stars end up generating light. In that sense, Sabine then goes on to speculate about various ideas of what the purpose of the universe could be. 

    She understands that talk about meaning or purpose is, in Aristotelian terms, teleological (concerns final causes), which modern science cut out of being because it was outside of its method and interests. (Modern science also cut out the question of "What is x?" i.e. the question of essence or the formal cause.) So it seems Sabine was well-aware that she was not explaining science in this video but thinking philosophically about science. 

   After watching all the many speculative accounts of what the point of the universe could be, it seemed to me like nature was being conceived like an inkblot: we can project countless interpretations on it, and the interpretation that makes most sense to a person tells us only about about their soul (soul in an everyday, not a metaphysical sense), and almost nothing about the universe. Nothing in science itself informs interpretations. Rather a kind of dark shadow on the soul allows nihilistic interpretations to make sense to the nihilist; a soul that has space for hope, faith, and love may give rise to more hopeful interpretations. (Can we live without hope?) Of course, you can have more or less authentic interpretations across the board. I prefer an authentic nihilist to a sentimental life-affirmer. But some interpretations diminish our humanity, de-mean it. Many no doubt feel a perverse pleasure in debunking our human "pretensions." My science teacher in Junior High School obviously relished informing us that we were nothing but a few dollars worth of chemicals.

Given that no experiment could falsify any of these interpretations - interpreting the universe is philosophy, theology, or myth (religion is officially sanctioned myth) - I don't see how science has anything to say about it. As Wittgenstein wrote: "even if all the problems of science were solved, the problems of life would not be touched at all."

Or as Sabine put its:

"Sinn ist nichts, was man in der Physik suchen darf."

(Don't study physics believing you will find meaning.)

And that actually says it all.

Sabine Hossenfelder, What Could B
e the Purpose of the Universe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgTiMEfWkHE

 The tendency to see ourselves as above nature has deep roots.

                                                        The Ghost in the Machine

 

 

Science as highlighting. The scientific framework means the epistemological purview that takes in one aspect of the world – the underlying, measurable, predictable, causal, material, ‘mechanical’. We owe to it fantastic insights into nature and powerful (problematic and nonproblematic) technology. I love much of science, all of science insofar as it is not in the service of organized greed or sheer dumb power.  But to equate absolutely the scientific framework with knowledge as such is scientism, not science. No possible experiment, no possible mathematical proof could conceivably refute or confirm such an ‘hypothesis’ because it is not a hypothesis but a metaphysical world version. The non-scientific idea is that if science can’t get it, it is not real. We can understand the appeal of that metaphysic to some scientists – it allows them to be Lords of nature, the ultimate judges of the Real – more medieval than the most absolutist medieval theologian! 

       The reduction of all knowledge from art to the understanding of the particularity of people and more, to our inner lives of meaning as a whole to religious revelation to the framework of scientific knowledge – that is a crazy move in the sense that if taken seriously it mean most of our lives (including the lives of scientists) are illusions. It is analogous to life in the Matrix (of the well-known film). Since it is a metaphysical world version, I cannot prove it wrong ‘objectively’ to someone intent on holding it. But from the inside of human life to live it out in utmost consequence would be a life at least bordering on insanity. I recall a scene from the film A Beautiful Mind where the mathematical genius tries to pick up a young woman at a bar. He said to her: “I don’t exactly know what I am required to say for you to have intercourse with me, but can we just assume I have said all that. I mean we are essentially talking about fluid exchange, right?” Not the words of a beautiful mind. Well she slaps him. Yet he is simply living in a world version in which scientism is assumed true and which he believes is true. One could imagine a culture, perhaps, based on that metaphysics (Swift came close to imagining one in Gulliver’s Travels as did C.S, Lewis in his science fiction). But what a culture! Still, this is the level one must think about metaphysical world versions.

 

 

The Body and the Soul. Imagine there are two pieces of paper in front of you. One of them is a genuine $5 bill. The other is a perfect counterfeit. In fact, imagine that forgers illegally created it with the very same equipment that created the real bill. The difference between the real $5 bill and the fake isn't a matter of the physical properties of the piece of paper. It is nothing that would reveal itself to physics. If the criterion to consider any x genuinely real is that in principle it can be explained by physics, then the distinction between the counterfeit and real bill is itself not real. But that is absurd. Therefore, that criterion can’t be right. 

        A similar point holds for the home run. There are certain things that have to happen physically for a physical event to count as a home run. But with a little imagination, we can tell a story about what's "really" going on that has nothing to do with baseball. It just looks like a real baseball game. Boys are playing war with the bat as the cannon and the ball at the cannonball. They are trying to bombard the pretend army on the other side of the fence, which they imagine to be a trench. But to be a home run, the physical events have to be part of an actual baseball game. Without the right intentions, rule-following, etc., no set of physical events amounts to a baseball game. There are physical regularities in a baseball game, but some of the most important things have to do with explicitly, intentionally, following a set of rules or norms. Physics has a lot to say about the physics of spheres colliding with bats and so on; physics has nothing to say about stolen bases, designated hitters, and the like.

       The physical events as described by physics, therefore, never describe a home run. But the baseball facts emerge from the physical facts that physics can describe. These are not two separate dimensions of reality. Physics simply abstracts and focuses on one particular aspect of reality. No amount of purely physical knowledge can ever explain baseball. Or culture. Or our inner lives.

       The meanings of things are equally as real as the purely physical events. Meaning is interwoven with the physical universe – not something outside of it. It is natural. Meanings are embedded in the matrix of nature; not some spooky unnatural stuff that can’t be explained or whose reality must be explained away. They just can’t be explained by physics (or any science conceived on analogy to physics). Why should anyone have ever thought that they could be or must be so explained?! Our inner lives don’t float free of physical facts; physical facts don’t make our inner lives unreal. We are talking about two aspects of one reality we all experience all the time. For me, this is a perfect description of how the soul and the body express one reality. 

 

 

Cremation.  It looks like I will have to go to the furnace rather than the grave when my life is done – for financial reasons; I am too poor to be buried. Perhaps my preference for rotting comes from all the poetry I have read where expressions like ‘fellow travelers to the grave’ occur; or the famous scene from Shakespeare where Hamlet speaks to the skull of the jester who loved so well as a child. There is nothing very poetic about the crematorium: indeed the first association I have with that word is the Holocaust, thus dehumanization, the destruction of human dignity in death. Anyway, I developed a morbid curiosity about the environmental impact cremating millions of people every week. The Internet of course provides instant information – thus from Wikipedia:

 

Each cremation requires about 110 L (28 US gal) of fuel and releases about 240 kg (540 lb.) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus, the roughly 1 million bodies that are cremated annually in the United States produce about 240,000 t (270,000 short tons) of carbon dioxide, which is more CO2 pollution than 22,000 average American homes generate in a year. The environmental impact may be reduced by using cremators for longer periods, and relaxing the requirement for a cremation to take place on the same day that the coffin is received, which reduces the use of fossil fuel and hence carbon emissions. Cremation is therefore becoming more friendly toward the environment. Some funeral and crematorium owners offer a carbon neutral funeral service incorporating efficient-burning coffins made from lightweight recycled composite board.

 

My morbid curiosity continued. I remember my science teacher once telling us twelve-year-old that actually we are nothing but about ten dollars’ worth of chemicals. Well, I wanted to check that and found this:

 

99% of the mass of the human body consists of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. They are worth about $576. All the other elements taken together are worth only about $9 more. For the calculations, I have assumed a mass of 80 kg, and the prices are the best estimates I could find.

 

 

Inflation. My morbid curiosity continued: what happens to the body chemically during cremation. Like magic, this came up:

 

Cremated remains are mostly dry calcium phosphates with some minor minerals, such as salts of sodium and potassium. Sulfur and most carbon are driven off as oxidized gases during the process, although about 1% to 4% of carbon remains as carbonate. The ash remaining represents very roughly 3.5% of the body's original mass (2.5% in children). Because the weight of dry bone fragments is so closely connected to skeletal mass, their weight varies greatly from person to person. Because many changes in body composition (such as fat and muscle loss or gain) do not affect the weight of cremated remains, the weight of the remains can be more closely predicted from the person's height and sex (which predicts skeletal weight), than it can be predicted from the person's simple weight.

 

Note the fine use of scientific style: the use of the passive voice; the typical vocabulary and syntax used for combining the technical terms. It is the language used to describe a laboratory experience, impersonal since anyone and everyone should see and record the same thing; it is repeatable, another name for ‘objective’; it doesn’t matter who the observer is – if they are doing science, they are all alike, allowing only for differences in competence such as you might find among bricklayers. Emotions are bracketed out. Meanings are bracketed out. It is a loveless, dry, abstract language – the language Data the android presumably would use. And indeed, scientifically we wouldn’t distinguish between the kind of descriptions and explanations involved in analyzing a cremation and those involved in the analyzing of burning garbage or burning oil or natural gas: scientifically, they are all on one, flat level. Surgeons speak the same language before doing a heart transplant, say; pharmaceutical researchers the same when discussing the processes of testing new chemical drugs on animals. And so on.

        

 

All facts are equal. This reflection on cremation got me thinking about one of the most interestingly written philosophical works I know, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus. There is posited that reality consists basically of just such flat ‘states of affairs’:

“The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts….” And language is meaningful only insofar as it consists of propositions that express (models, represents, pictures, share a logical form with, corresponds to) such facts. The “world” according to Wittgenstein we could by imagining all possible scientific hypotheses getting a scientifically testable answer; then we would have complete knowledge of reality as it is in itself – a giant library full of such descriptions such as I offered about cremation. That such facts are flat can be inferred from what he says at the end of the book about propositions: “All propositions are of equal value (Alle Sätze sind gleichwertig).” Further:

 

In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value…. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

 

And this fits to the language of cremation I cited above; whether it is the body of father or the burning of gasoline by a particular car motor, as far as the chemist is concerned, both are on the same level. Any personal, human, “subjective” feelings are completely separate from the objective description of the world, a world of facts where all facts are of equal and thus no value. Value, meaning is outside the world, outside of meaningful language even:

 

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is this not the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) Still, there is the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

 

In this way of thinking, if I make the transition from thinking about chemical processes and environmental impacts to thinking about my response to my father’s death and cremation – let’s say from a realm of fact to a realm of meaning, of love (and the failures of love) – then “I” am actually leaving the world. I am thereby leaving the possibility of meaningful (true or false) linguistic expression. I am entering an inexpressible mystical realm, where something beyond the world shows itself in the world. The chemical analysis of the cremation, the autopsy (had there been one) – anything say-able (in propositions), anything that science could possibly say about my father’s death meaning of my father’s death must necessarily be utterly blind, indeed indifferent, to any meaning it has. 

      This meaning, which is intertwined with the love I and I believe my whole family had for him, is mystical for Wittgenstein; most of my contemporaries, who mostly hold to a dualism between the objective world of scientific facts and the inner world of human emotions, of the inner life, would not go so far. They would simply say the meaning my father’s death and cremation had for me is “subjective.” This view has attracted me. I most strongly reject it, however. Well, to say something positive about cremation: it is better than having my body imprisoned in an airtight, non-degradable coffin.

 

 

Dualism, the body, and the soul. This radical division of the world into an objective realm of fact and a subjective realm of meaning/value is a modern form of an ancient way of thinking, present in some Hindu spirituality, in other religions of the near East (Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism), in the development of lines of thought in Protagoras and Plato. The body, the material world is either meaningless or worse, positively evil; the spirit, the subjective inner life, is the source of all meaning and value. The body is an outer casing, or a prison for the spirit. It operates according to its own depersonalized laws and is always at least in principle in conflict with spirit, which is free insofar as it does not become dominated by the body. The point of religious expression of dualism is clear: to free the spirit from the tendency of the material body to dominate it.

      What strikes me is how dualistic (gnostic even) modern philosophy became, and how strong it is in popular culture. Descartes’ methodological doubting of everything, even the ‘outer world’ as accessed through our organs of perception, left him with only the certainty of his solitary ego and its spiritual, non-material nature. Kant’s moral philosophy recognizes only one Good: the good will, thus something outside the material world we experience. The world of matter is the province of science; the world of spirit is the province of morality. All value comes from the spirit; the material or phenomenal world obeys mechanical laws and is indifferent to our spiritual needs. Who we are, our essential self, is disconnected from the body that contains it, a body that like every other material object in the universe follows the laws of matter, exhaustively describable by a perfect science. Wittgenstein’s logical view of the world is in this tradition.

      Now this is a possible world version (in Goodman’s sense), subject only to the circular kinds of reduction to absurdity refutations that can never be definitive. But as Wittgenstein well knew, there is no fact of the matter about it. Nothing forces me to adopt it if it doesn’t make better sense than other world versions. It has become so powerful culturally, it almost has the force of common sense, despite those scientifically minded, reductionist academics who would eliminate the spiritual entirely from their world version and include only the material world as explainable by science (with perhaps some mathematical objects).

      My view is this. The meanings involved in our lives – in particular, the meaning of my father’s death – are actual. Rather than seeing them as “mystical” because they are outside the realm of fact, of science, I think it makes more sense to see them as belonging to reality, to nature – to see nature itself as mystical, if that helps to capture the wonder of it all. I am not a spirit trapped in a body, a ghost in a machine. Nor I am identical to what science can tell me about my body, to the set of possible scientific propositions about my body. The conclusion is clear: we are material beings, and our lives are meaningful, loving at best, constantly failing at love. Therefore: we are material beings capable of spirit; material-spiritual beings; body-souls; besouled-bodies. Matter (matter-energy) is in potential anyhow more than just a bunch of stuff exhaustively describable by our science. And when am awakened to the beauty and wonder of color, of trees, or whatever, the only thing that keeps me from thinking that those are rational responses to the reality of matter is the dualistic ontology that many people for intellectual, cultural, and emotional reasons hold on to. (Our culture was defined when the first missionary cut down the first sacred grove of trees.) There is beauty everywhere, but not everyone can see it, Confucius said. I guess I am more a fan of material than the wrongly called “materialists.”       My father died; his body was cremated. I will die and my body will probably be cremated. Science can tell us as much as such events as spectrographic analysis can tell us about

          Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son or an acoustic analysis could tell us about the Matthew Passion of Bach – spiritualized matter, material embodiments of spirit. All the great and terrible realities of the human spirit are not separate from ‘the universe’; not uncanny spiritual substances thrown into some chance relation with matter. Meaning, the spirit, love, beauty, etc. are as much a part of the universe as the sun, as atoms and molecules, as forces and gravity.

      Thus, there is another world version besides ‘all reality is matter-energy or spirit’ and ‘all reality is nothing but matter-energy’; there is also ‘reality includes spiritual matter, whatever else it includes.’

 

 

Modern and Traditional Worldviews

From the perspective of the Aristotelian-Thomist-Tolkien interpretation of nature (or Being, reality – different accents of the same phenomenon), modernity was radically reductionist. It denied Hamlet’s belief that “there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy [or science],” replying “there is less in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your common-sense experience.”

. . .

E. F. Schumacher in his wonderful book A Guide for the Perplexed. He states the worldview he argues against like this:

It is being loudly proclaimed, in the name of scientific objectivity, that 'values and meanings are nothing but defence mechanisms and reaction formations'; that man is 'nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information'; Sigmund Freud even assured us that 'this alone I know with certainty, namely that man's value judgments are guided absolutely by their desire for happiness [i.e. pleasure], and are therefore merely an attempt to bolster up their illusions by arguments.'

Schumacher – explicitly embracing Aristotle and Aquinas, argued that we must eschew the reductionist inclination to fragment nature (including human nature) into mere mechanical parts. The mineral/material foundation, though essential, is but the initial tier in a grand hierarchy of existence. It is the plant that adds to matter the vital force, elevating what matter can be with the miracle of growth and sustenance. The animal, in turn, enriches this vital force with the gift of consciousness, perception, and instinctual response. Yet it is humanity that transcends all preceding levels with the capacity for self-awareness, rational thought, and moral discernment. A hierarchy of being – a great chain of being – is imagined.

 To perceive a tree merely as a collection of timber is to ignore the intricate dance of life that animates its structure, the delicate interplay of sunlight, water, and soil that sustains it, and the quiet dignity it can lend to life. Each stratum of being contributes distinct and invaluable qualities, forming a complex and interwoven tapestry that eludes reduction to simplistic terms.

     Reductionism denies the being of all the higher levels, reducing them by explaining them solely in terms of the lowest levels. Self-consciousness is explained in terms of animal consciousness, which is then explained in terms of biochemistry, which itself can be cashed out in terms of inorganic chemistry and physics. The Self doing the explaining is left stranded, left with a residue of unreality, and yet is severed from any reality to conform its judgments to other than its own felt desires.

     Schumacher's critique of reductionism emphasizes that true understanding demands an appreciation of each level's unique contributions. The essence of life, consciousness, and self-awareness cannot be fully apprehended by examining their material bases alone. We must acknowledge the emergent properties and intrinsic purposes that characterize each stage, recognizing the holistic interdependence that defines our reality. Thus, the pursuit of wisdom lies in embracing the full spectrum of existence, honoring the irreducible interconnectedness and the transcendent qualities that emerge at each ascending level. Only through this approach can we hope to grasp the true being of the natural world and our place within it.

. . .

Galileo was truly a founding father of the modern worldview. Galileo’s ontology came before his science; indeed, it made his science possible. He posited along with the other founding fathers of modernity that only the so-called “primary qualities” such as shape, size, motion, and solidity are the fundamental realities. In other words, only those aspects of reality that can be quantified By focusing exclusively on these objective, measurable attributes, Galileo moved away from Aristotle's framework that emphasized formal causes (the essence of things) and final causes (their purpose and value). The essence or formal cause, which involves the intrinsic nature or defining characteristics of an object, became less relevant in Galileo's framework. Instead of asking what makes an object essentially what it is, Galileo focused on how its primary qualities can be described and predicted through mathematical laws. The purpose or final cause, which Aristotle saw as central to understanding the nature of objects, was largely ignored by Galileo. He did not concern himself with the purpose of natural phenomena but with the mechanisms by which they operate. This mechanistic view aligns with his ontology, where primary qualities and their interactions constitute the fundamental reality. The Book of Nature was no longer intelligible in language but in mathematics: mathematics was the language of nature, as Galileo wrote. To sum it up: Galileo concentrated on material and efficient causes alone, using empirical observation and mathematical description to uncover the laws governing physical phenomena.

       This shift allowed Galileo to establish a foundation for “objective science,” rooted in quantifiable and universal principles, thus rejecting the qualitative, philosophical approach of Aristotelian science. Through this lens, our entire subjective life was made unreal, reduced to “primary qualities”. Our consciousness, though unreal, was still unavoidably experienced – it takes a mind to think the thought that the mind as experienced is not real. This real-unreal consciousness thus could become “lord and master” over nature, as Descartes put it. [None of this is my original interpretation. I am telling the story in a condensed fashion as I learned about it from reading. I will list some books at the end of this entry.]

. . .

  To become lord and master over nature: that was the point. Nature was stripped of meaning and value, for that was the import of banning the formal and final causes from Being. Understanding nature only from the narrow perspective of what gives certain groups among us the power to harness its forces to purposes no longer judged by nature or natural reason: mostly. Power and profit. The “dark, Satanic mills” (William Blake) – driven by steam power produced by burning tons of coal – soon followed. The rest is history. [Science and technology are 95% in the service of corporate power and profit today, which is unsurprising.] I am not suggesting that there was no exploitation of man and nature before modern industrial capitalism, the fruit of the world view ushered in by Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Descartes, and others. But at least concerning the exploitation of nature, the handicraft methods used could barely make a scratch. Only when the conquest of nature became a project, expressing a pure technological-industrial and bureaucratic-capitalist rationality did it take off. Rather like Auschwitz was to previous genocidal crimes.

   I wrote that the picture of the Appalachian wasteland had something to do with autonomy, which has much to do with how we understand ourselves today. We see nature as raw material to do with as we see fit; we see our bodies as raw material to do with as we see fit. Nature (reality) – understood as nothing but material and efficient causes in Aristotelian terms – is severed from the mind, which is its own place and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. If we want 72 genders, we can have 72 genders; nature has nothing to say. Or if it does have something to say, then only what can be understood in terms of the material or efficient cause – not essence or telos, not meaning or value in other words.  The hippies of the sixties and the capitalists are ideological mates: both believe the self is the source of morals, not nature. If we want to transform an ancient forest into a strip mine or a purely aesthetic object for the tourist industry (e.g. a nature preserve), we can. We are the source of reality and value, we contribute, we define the formal and final causes, we project our wishes onto the blank screen of nature (including our bodies).

. . .

   My sympathies are entirely with Aristotle and Thomas – well, not entirely. Aristotelian natural philosophy, particularly through the interpretations of Thomas Aquinas, was instrumental in justifying the subordination of women and the working classes in medieval times. Aristotle's understanding of teleology (final causes) suggested that men and women had inherently different natures and roles, with men being rational leaders and women being suited for reproductive and domestic tasks. Aquinas integrated these ideas with Christian theology, arguing that societal roles reflected God's divine plan. He supported a hierarchical society where the ruling classes were naturally endowed with superior rational and moral qualities, while women and the working classes were seen as lacking these virtues and thus naturally suited to supportive and manual roles. This alignment of natural philosophy with religious doctrine legitimized existing social structures, perpetuated gender and class inequalities, and reinforced the notion that challenging one’s divinely ordained position was against both nature and divine will.

    Moreover, Aristotelian natural philosophy, as interpreted by Thomas Aquinas in medieval times, provided a framework that condemned homosexuality based on its views of natural law and the purpose of human sexuality. Aristotle's emphasis on teleology, where everything in nature has a specific purpose, aligned with Aquinas' integration of these ideas into Christian theology. They argued that the primary purpose of sexual activity is procreation, and any sexual behavior not conducive to this purpose was considered "unnatural" and morally wrong. Aquinas viewed natural law as reflecting divine will, making adherence to procreative purposes essential for moral behavior. Consequently, homosexuality was condemned as a violation of natural law, seen as contrary to both human nature and divine intent. It is still understood in this way by conservative Catholicism. This philosophical and theological perspective justified the widespread condemnation and prohibition of homosexual acts in medieval society, contributing to legal penalties, social stigma, and reinforcing heteronormative cultural norms that persisted for centuries.

   So not surprising the same worldview that removed the restraints on the capitalist to exploit the earth and human labor removed the restraints on women, working people, and homosexuals from resisting the ideological versions of hierarchy keeping them down.

   Either these injustices were a direct implication of the Aristotelian-Thomist way of understanding nature or a corruption of this way of understanding nature, reflecting the ideologies of their culture. [Ideology is false consciousness, an obscuring of the reality of unjust power structures through false or misleading narratives.] I guess the thought of no one who has ever lived in the historical period of humanity has been completely free of ideology. To throw out a profound and realistic philosophy because parts of it were polluted with ideology was like throwing out the baby with the dirty bath water. We need to reanimate this philosophy. Modernity is destroying both the natural and human worlds. In the end, it is what is in people’s heads that is doing this destruction. We make pictures of ourselves and then become like the pictures, wrote Iris Murdoch. We need a better picture of humanity and nature.

    But within that better picture we need a better, more truthful, more just understanding of the nature of work, the body, sexuality, the sexes, and homosexuality. Animals too. Well, of the nature of everything. No merely human understanding can ever be final. We can and should go on deepening our understanding of everything without end.

Source books. Most of these I studied as a student. The philosophy of technology was a keen interest of mine then, and has remained so. Some of these are hard reads. The books by Schumacher, Berry, Tarnas, Winner, and Sherrard are written in an easily accessible style.

Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, 1961, 1976.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977.

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, 1964.

William Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 1972.

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934

Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 1969.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science, 1987.

Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World, 1991.

Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought, 1977.

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.

 The First Principle of Modernity

    Imagine the world as do those who believe that there is no more in Heaven or on Earth than can be researched and (in principle at least) measured, quantified, and thus known by the methods of science. There is nothing else, nothing (in one version of this) that the equations of physics cannot (in principle at least) cannot predict. Thus human life, what we think of as our inner or spiritual life as well as what we can know, is part of a closed system. The laws that determine everything in the system are the laws of physics (or perhaps physics plus chemistry and biochemistry). The universe's origin, life, and what we understand as self-consciousness are all a function of the closed system of “nature.” This system has no purpose and no meaning, except what evolution has programmed us to imagine and project. We did not exist for an eternity before we emerged and we will not exist for an eternity after we perish. Our existence is like a blink of an eye. We are insignificant because there is no significance in a closed system except as a naturally occurring system of illusions promoting the perpetuation of the species. Our morality reduces to this system of illusions. No God exists outside the system – God is an unnecessary hypothesis – to remember us, care about us, add meaning and purpose to our lives. After my death, oblivion. After my children die, no one will even no I existed. Soon no one will know my children existed. Soon even no one will ever human beings existed. The earth will also cease to exist. This universe will cease to exist. Whether other universes will come into being is unknown and doesn’t matter in the end. If all our loves and lives matter only to us insofar as we exist in this weirdly alienated form – alienated as self-conscious beings from the closed system of nature that is our reality and from which our species-preserving illusions separate us – the only value is in our heads, insofar as we cannot accept the truth of our situation. Our “reason” is a kind of biochemical computer with an AI that allows us to manipulate our environment as an aid to survival. We know that our self-consciousness lives are embedded in the Matrix of a closed natural system, which our AI can understand to a limited extent, but we cannot get out of our programming, we are locked into a biochemical-computer-generated illusion that we are a self among others, that our self-consciousness somehow exists apart from and outside of the Matrix: a veil of Maya generated by a subsystem that programs us to define ourselves as individuals. Imagine that is the way the world really is.

    What consequences follow? We could resign ourselves and view the world with detached curiosity. Despair makes sense. We could embrace our illusory selves and increase pleasure and power – there is no (moral) reason not to for there is no morality in the closed system. We could pretend we were real and define for ourselves goals and meanings, as though these too were real and mattered. We could try not to think about it. We could make up religions that functioned like opium. We could eat, drink, and be merry: the taste of good food and wine seems real enough. We could detach ourselves like a good Buddhist and pity humanity, indeed all of life. We can choose to live as if nature (at least our nature) were not a closed, mechanistic system. We can choose, as Macbeth put it, to strut and fret our hour on the stage, or we can choose to end it. Perhaps there are other options; the world as I have imagined it limits those options. (Any way you imagine the world always limits intelligible responses to it.)

    What all these options share is a picture of the unreal self as the source of all (ultimately illusory) value, purpose, and meaning. The death of the self is the end of an illusion, but also the end of (ultimately illusory) meanings. The self – albeit illusory – is all we have left. It takes the place of God. We see this in our culture in this: someone questions the desirability of a person's choices, and get answered: "he likes it" or "I like it." Now that is a non sequitur. It functions is to cut off thought about the desirability of the choice. But it makes perfect sense if the "I" is apart from anything that could provide a criterion to judge the choice by. It makes perfect sense if reality has nothing to say. If what is good is reducible to what a person happens to like.  And by the way, connecting to my last two entries, if we embrace this ontology, then homosexuality or any kind of sexuality violates nothing because there is nothing to violate. Given a choice between that nihilism, let's call it, and the 7th circle of Hell (the burning desert and the fire rain), I'd take the nihilism! So it is understandable to me that most homosexuals opted out of reality.  

   What I have done is to picture the ontology – the picture of reality as a whole – that informs “autonomy.” It is not the only possible ontology compatible with “autonomy.” You can imagine with Descartes an immaterial soul somehow working in inexplicable coordination with a material body. But I think that historically, sociologically, the picture I described has (largely below the surface of consciousness) structured our pop-moralities of autonomy.

   Nothing forces anyone for purely rational reasons to find the ontology compelling. It is no more rational or irrational than any of the theistic ontologies, for example. It is true you don’t have to posit realities outside the domain of natural science. That seems an advantage of this ontology to many people. But the price is the making unreal of our inner lives and of human history. Under the circumstances of modern culture, it has become compelling to many people.

   It is as though the devil had been our metaphysics instructor for the past few centuries. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas (for all their faults, which can be corrected in revisions) were much better instructors. With homosexuality, it is a matter of making space within nature, within reality, for a loving way to exist - not closing off this possibility in advance, as did Thomas following tradition.