Threatening Naturalism’s Universal Authority

AR: I apologize for the clumsy phrasing of the previous question, because I think we’re on the same page. However, your fraternal correction foregrounded a question that remained on the peripheries of my mind while reading your book. You say that monocausal explanations are “enormously fruitful” in advancing our understanding of nature. Has the application of such scientific methods impoverished our understanding of nature as much, if not more, than it has impoverished our understanding of the human person?

TP: My reference to “mono-causal forms of explanation” pertains to a type of enquiry positing nature strictly as raw material exhibiting observable and repeatable regularities and, hence, susceptible of being described exhaustively in terms of efficient causation. In committing to this a priori view, modern science has proven undeniably “fruitful” – albeit in a very particular and dangerously limiting sense. That is, it has greatly advanced the “discovery” of the kind of nature that those pursuing its study had evidently sought, namely, nature as “resource,” as property, as something to subdue, manipulate, and render subservient to human desire and curiositas. Inevitably, such a paradigm has also come at a price, one that we are just now beginning to grasp, and that has become all but impossible to deny, the global and trans-generational costs of this appropriative model, preeminently in the form of ecological devastation wrought by consumable “products” extracted from nature and, of course, in the frightening reality of irreversible climate change.

Flushed with a sense of mastery, ownership, and seemingly infinite prospects of capitalizing on nature qua “resource,” post-Hobbesian societies gradually and to varying degrees lost sight of the other dimension of nature, one that Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their Continental peers (Schelling, Novalis, Eichendorff) had sought to keep in focus; others, drawing on different genealogies of inquiry, were to follow them (e.g., Newman, Blondel, Spaemann, Scheler, Marion, to name but a few). This other dimension concerns the idea of nature as self-giving gift, as kosmos (“order”), and as a source of orientation and beauty. Take the case of Goethe’s and Schelling’s conception of natura naturans and of “form” as something in which we participate, rather than unilaterally imposing it on supposedly inert and “dumb” matter. As I’ve tried to show elsewhere, such a model notably revives the neo-Platonic (Plotinian) conceptions, elements of which can also be found in Aquinas [See: My essay on Goethe, “All is Leaf: Differentiation, Metamorphosis, and the Phenomenology of Life”].

Yet inasmuch as the one-dimensional conception of nature as inert matter passively awaiting the imprint of our desires has arguably been the dominant paradigm for the past two centuries at least, it was all but inevitable that it should also have infiltrated our understanding of human nature. For mono-causal strategies of explanation are inherently all-encompassing in their self-understanding; they cannot permit exceptions to their hegemonic claims. For to allow even one such exception – say, that of an agent intrinsically self-aware, endowed with the capacity for responsible choice,  self-transformation, and an evolving self-awareness qua will – is felt to threaten the universal authority of naturalism. Hence the genealogy of explanatory schemes (Humean skepticism, Schopenhauer’s existentialism, behaviorism from Watson to Skinner, and neuro-reductionism in the present) eager to construe human nature strictly as a mechanical input/output ratio that at some point in the hypothetical future will supposedly have been captured definitively and exhaustively. Yet given that this all-encompassing epistemological claim is infinitely deferred, that is, can never actually be cashed out in the present, strictly reductionist epistemologies can indeed be regarded as the equivalent of pyramid schemes that have wrought much havoc in contemporary finance (MtM 292). By contrast, my emphasis on phenomenological accounts of the human person, a framework for which Coleridge in particular is an important precursor, means to suggest that this aggressive naturalizing approach does not so much explain human agency as  “explain away” and, thus, gravely impoverish our grasp of the underlying, complex issues. What we need, today more than ever, are epistemologies that acknowledge the distinction between informational and interpretive knowledge, and whose explanatory ambitions and claims are balanced by an ethos of humility.