Toward a Philosophy of Nature:
The Bases for an Ecological Ethics [6]

Few philosophical areas have gained the social relevance in recent years that nature philosophy, with all its ethical implications, has acquired. A considerable segment of the literate public is now deeply occupied with seeking a philosophical interpretation of nature as a grounding for human conduct and social policy. The literature on the subject has reached truly impressive proportions and has collected a sizable public readership. In fact, it is fair to say that this interest in nature philosophy is comparable to that which Darwinian evolutionary theory generated a century ago — and it is almost equally disputatious, with equally important social implications.

But the current interest in society’s relationship to nature differs basically from the continuing dispute between creationism and the theory of evolution. It emerges from a deep public concern over the ecological dislocations that uniquely mark our era. Initially, in the early and mid-seventies, this concern had a largely technocratic and legalistic focus and centered on problems of pollution, resource depletion, demography, urban sprawl, nuclear power plants, the increasing incidence of cancer — in short, the problems of conventional environmentalism.[7] Environmentalists saw these problems in strictly practical terms and considered them resolvable by legislative action, public education, and personal example.

The philosophical literature that has emerged in recent years stems from a significant popular dissatisfaction with strictly issue-oriented approaches to the current environmental crisis and reflects the need for a new theoretical turn. It addresses itself to a basically new concern: to develop an ecologically creative sensibility toward the environment, one that can serve in the highest ethical sense as a guide for human conduct and provide an awareness of humanity’s “place in nature”[8] These philosophical works do not deal with nature merely as an environmental problematic; rather, they advance a vision of the natural world and raise it to the level of an inspirited metaphysical principle — without denying the significance of the environmental activism they seek to transcend. If the often narrow activism of the early and mid-seventies can be called the politics of environmentalism, the nature philosophy (which is in no way to be confused with the philosophy of science) that is surfacing so prominently today can be called its ethics, and to some degree its social conscience. Today’s nature philosophies that try to bring humanity and nature into ethical commonality are meant to correct imbalances in a disequilibrated cosmos or in an irrational society.

Characteristically, the academy lags behind in this intellectualization of ecological problems. This problem is serious because the Western philosophical tradition could greatly enrich the present nature-philosophical turn; yet the academy has rendered it needlessly technical or worse, reduced it to the production of mere historical and monographic memorabilia. Much of what passes for nature philosophy today outside the campus, therefore, tends to lack roots in the Western philosophical tradition, and such Western traditions as the ecological movement does invoke have a strongly intuitional thrust.

Nor does the academy always add clarity when it does bring its intellectual equipment to intervene in the discussion. Today, virtually all nature philosophy is burdened by a massive number of stultifying prejudices, but the worst of these prejudices fester precisely in the academy. There, any conjunction of the words nature and philosophy automatically evokes fears of antiscientific archaisms and premodernist regressions to a static cosmological metaphysics. To speak frankly, the academic mind has been trained to view nature philosophy as inimical to critical and analytical thought No less prejudicial in this regard are the “neo-Marxists,” “post-Marxists,” and empirical anarchists (for whom any philosophy short of Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism is sheer theology), who uneasily regard all organicist theories as redolent of either dialectical materialism or neo-fascist folk philosophies. Unless such prejudices are dispelled — or at least explored insight” fully and critically — the terrain of a serious nature philosophy will be left open to mystical tendencies and intuitions that may well render any rational discussion of ecological issues impossible.

In any case, the public desire for new nature philosophies will not disappear, and the works that are appearing to satisfy this need are no less problematic than the academy’s conventional wisdom on the subject. It will not do for European and American academics to disparage this trend by speckling it with learned name-droppings like “neo-Aristotelianism” or by invoking the disparate pedigrees of Schelling, Driesch, Bergson, and Heidegger.

Contemporary excursions into nature philosophy require a broader philosophical grounding than they normally receive. Unfortunately, they typically draw their nourishment more from systems theory than from the Greeks and the Germans, and their hues are tinted by Asian rather than Western cosmogonies. If such eclecticism seems discordant to academic philosophical theorists, I would argue that they must do better, rather than simply add a new set of prejudices to ones that already exist. Whether one chooses to regard recent nature-philosophical works as a loss or benefit to the ecology movement, this much is clear: if our schooled philosophical theorists turn their backs on the rising theoretical interest in the meaning of nature and humanity’s place in it, they will merely cut themselves off further from some of the most important developments in contemporary society.

Before we turn to the widely disparate theorists of popular nature philosophies, we must deal with a problem that unceasingly nags the academic acolytes of modern scientism. Like a troubling and eruptive unconscious, it plagues the philosophical superego of the academy and some of its self-professed radical theorists. This philosophical unconscious is “the Tradition,” or what is more arrogantly called the “archaic” background that predates Enlightenment — indeed, modern — philosophy. Modern subjectivistic and scientistic orientations have raised a barrier against pre-Enlightenment philosophy that permits little of it to filter through, so that its own origins have become a mystery to Western philosophy, a frightening specter like the primal nightmares of childhood that haunt the armored ego of the adult. True, interest in Aristotle’s Metaphysics “remains perennial,” as we are told, and “does not flag or fail with the passing years, no matter how far the fashion of thought current at the moment may seem to wander from the confines of Aristotelian tradition.”[9] But apart from such canonical works, the censor that acts like a screen on earlier philosophies seems remarkably secure. Heidegger capitalized on this failure (regrettably, in my view) and delved into the originating thinkers of Western philosophy, arguing that they are worthy of serious exegesis (although not all of Heidegger’s “woodpaths” are to be followed).[10] Ontology understandably bears a fearsome visage when it lacks a social and moral context, and the concept of Being loses contact with reality when it is subtly assimilated to subjective approaches to reality like Heidegger’s.

Limitations of space make it impossible for me to fully explore the problems that my remarks on these prejudices doubtless raise. But even some of the best-known theorists of nature philosophy in the ecology movement today commit an error. Although they may be cognizant of the prejudices and the censoring mechanisms that separate contemporary philosophy from its own history, they have dug their trenches poorly by defining themselves against Descartes rather than Kant.

This is by no means an academic issue, nor is it strictly a philosophical one. The emphasis on Cartesian mechanism as the original sin that distorted the modern image of nature has been overstated for reasons that are more programmatic than theoretical. Villainous as Descartes may seem, it is a certain realpolitik, I suspect, that demonizes him over Kant For to single out Kant would necessitate challenging the dubious subjectivism — such as the subjectivism that Gregory Bateson gives to systems theory — and quasi-religious transcendentalism now burgeoning in so much contemporary “antimechanistic” thinking. As a result, philosophical theories of nature and the objective ecological ethics derived from them are being created in the false light of the “epistemological turn” that Kant ultimately gave to Western philosophy. The ontologically oriented pre-Kantian interpretations of nature remain as ambiguous in the ecology movement as in the academy.

But premodern and particularly Presocratic philosophy is not the dead dog that conventional philosophy depicts it as being. I am not concerned, for the present, with the specific speculations that pre-Kantian philosophies advanced — particularly those of the Presocratics. Rather, I am concerned with their intentions and with the kind of unities they tried to foster. What is important, as Gregory Vlastos has so admirably emphasized, is that they authentically voiced an objectivity permeated by ethics. Indeed, in contrast to the naturalism that became so fashionable in American academies during the 1930s and 1940s, the unifying feature of the Ionian, Eleatic, Heraclitean and Pythagorean trends is precisely their conviction that the universe had in some sense a moral character irrespective of human purposes. So alien is this proposition to the post-Kantian era that it is dismissed as “archaic” and “teleological” almost as a knee-jerk reaction.[11] Yet one cannot simply dismiss the fact that such great themes as Being, Form, Motion and Causality were once infused with moral meaning. In fact they permeate speculative philosophy to this day. The various ways in which the Presocratics explained the arche of the world followed out the logic of this moral meaning.

The very ability to know implies that the world is orderly and intelligible and that it lends itself to rational interpretation because it is rational. From Thales to Hegel, philosophy consistently retained this essential orientation. As Lawrence J. Henderson wrote in his immensely influential 1912 work The Fitness of the Environment, the “idea of purpose and order are among the first concepts regarding their environment which appear, a vague anticipation of philosophy and science, in the minds of men.” For Henderson, to be sure, it was the “advent of modern science” that validated universal order — in the form of natural law; Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection, in turn, validated natural law “as the basis of purpose,” specifically the “new scientific concept of fitness,” and thereby rescued speculative thought from the “dogma of final causes.”[12] But what is important in Henderson’s remarks is that he regards the world as intelligible, not the specific content of that intelligibility.

Hellenic thought, by the same token, was pointedly moral insofar as it saw the world as rational — that is, its rationality and intelligibility were equivalent to its morality. However intuitively or consciously, the Hellenic notion of nous — mind — constituted the world or inhered in it. Precisely because one could explain the world, the world was meaningful. Nor did Presocratic thought stop at partial explanations of order; it tried to explain it to the fullest. Accounts of the arche of the world — its active substance — are redolent with meaning, such as water (which perhaps alludes kinship) and the “unbounded” or “aer” (which historians of Greek philosophy now regard as “soul,” the “breath of life”).

This sense of reality as pregnant, fecund, and immanently self-elaborating still provides direction for an ecological philosophy, however arguable the nature philosophies of the pre-Kantian past may be. Of particular interest here are the Presocratics. Emphasis on the Presocratics’ “naivete,” their “ontological need” (to use one of Theodor Adorno’s many unfortunate phrases), and their “monism” has all too cheaply obscured this possibility. That Presocratic thought was riddled by demonstrably false archaisms is beside the point. It is its orientation that concerns us, not its ontological merits, and its animistic aspects are such as might be expected in a transition from the mythopeic world to the world of Plato and Aristotle. And in contrast to Heidegger, we should not view the Presocratics as having an “authentic,” prelapsarian relationship with Being but as points of departure for the richer philosophical insights of Plato, Aristotle, and the other philosophers who constitute the Western philosophical tradition. My high valuation of the Presocratics here is purely heuristic: I do not intend to argue for their notion of “cosmic justice” — which was patently an extrapolation of the democratic polis into the natural world — or for adherence to their view that nature is “just” in any other sense. Rather, I wish to emphasize the importance of searching for values that can be grounded in nature — more basically, in natural evolution.

Despite their “naivete,” the Pythagorean arche — form — and ideals of limit, kosmos (order combined with beauty), and krasis (equilibrium) have a remarkable, indeed alluring richness. The Pythagorean notion of form, for example, is essential for understanding holism, for it adds the formal concept of arrangement to the numerical notion of sum. The notion of form as the expression of the good and the beautiful renders virtue cosmically immanent.

More radically, the Presocratics anchored their interpretation of nature in the notion of isonomia (equality), which includes the equality of the very elements that make up the world. Philosophers from Anaximander to Empedocles had a thoroughgoing respect for a ubiquitous principle of equality. So consciously did they hold the principle, that Alcmaeon used the term monarchy with opprobrium to characterize the “mastery” or “supremacy” of one cosmic power over another. Krasis is not the mechanical equipoise of contrasting powers but, more organically, their blending and, in the sequence of phenomena (initially, in. Greek medical theory), their rotation. “As in the democratic polis The demos rules by turn, so the hot could prevail in summer without injustice to the cold, if the latter had its turn in the winter,” Vlastos observes, highlighting the parallels between the Athenian political system and this notion. “And if a similar and concurrent cycle of successive supremacy could be assumed to hold among the powers in the human body, then the krasis of man and nature would be perfect.”[13]

Empedocles thoroughly naturalized this “elegant tissue of assumptions,” as Vlastos calls these parallels between society and nature. His concept of “roots” as distinguished from “elements,” undifferentiated “Being,” and “atoms” vastly enlarged the implicit Hellenic notion of an immanently generative nature to a point unsurpassed even by Aristotle. The “roots,” as Francis Cornford observes, are “equal in status or lot”; they rotate their “rule” with their own unique “honor,” for in no case is the universe a “monarchy” and none of its powers can claim even the primacy that Thales gave to fluidity and Anaximenes to soul.[14]

Presocratic thought was consciously infused by a far-reaching notion of cosmic justice, or dikaisyne. This concept of justice extends beyond social and personal issues to nature itself. For the Presocratics, “justice is no longer inscrutable moira, imposed by arbitrary forces with incalculable effect. Nor is she the goddess Dike, moral and rational enough, but frail and unreliable.” Unlike Hesiod’s Dike, this justice is one with nature itself and “could no more leave the earth than the earth could leave its place in the firmament.”[15] Its opposite, adikaisyne, marks every transgression of cosmic justice — of the law of the measure and the peras or limit of things and relationships. It demands reparation and the restoration of harmony.

Nature, in effect, appeared as a commonwealth, a polis, whose isonomia effaced the “distinctions between two grades of being — divine and mortal, lordly and subservient, noble and mean, of higher and lower honor. It was the ending of these distinctions that made nature autonomous and therefore completely and unexceptionally ‘just’ Given a society of equals, it was assumed, justice was sure to follow, for none would have the power to dominate the rest. This assumption ... had a strictly physical sense. It was accepted not as a political dogma but as a theorem in physical inquiry. It is, none the less, remarkable evidence of the confidence which the great age of Greek democracy possessed in the validity of the democratic idea — a confidence so robust that it survived translation into the first principles of cosmology and medical theory.[16]

---

Naive as the Presocratic view may be with all its archaisms, a nature philosophy that is more than the simple contest between mechanism and organicism encountered today would serve to clarify the wayward fortunes of Western philosophy and challenge the limits it has imposed on ecological ethics. Ironically, the founders of modern science — Copernicus, Kepler, and Tycho Brahe — were raging Pythagoreans. What early Renaissance thought and science rescued from the ancients was not isonomia but form, as well as the shared premise of all speculative reason that nature is an intelligible kosmos. Descartes never challenged this conceptual framework — he merely gave it a mechanical form, alluring and subversive for its time.

It was Kant — a near Jacobin — who made the most significant turn in Western philosophy with his “Copernican revolution,” the “epistemological turn.” Kant finally denatured nature of its Presocratic remnant by removing the material “grade of being” altogether. Things-in-themselves ceased to be things at all for cognitive purposes, and one grade of Being effectively ceased to exist. Kant left us alone with our own subjectivity. “Kant does not, like all earlier philosophers, investigate objects,” as Karl Jaspers incisively summarized the issue; “what he inquires into is our knowledge of objects. He provides no doctrine of the metaphysical world, but a critique of the reason that aspires to know it. He gives no doctrine of Being as something objectively known, but an elucidation of existence as the situation of our consciousness. Or, in his own words, he provides no ‘doctrine’ but a ‘propaedeutics.’” Accordingly, Kantian categories have objective validity only insofar as they remain within the limits of possible experience. After Kant, “metaphysics in the sense of objective knowledge of the supersensible or as ontology, which teaches being as whole, is impossible.”[17]

As liberating as this innovation was from absolute empiricism, which renders its own experience in a world of pure Being, it was not liberating from absolutes generally. Kant himself made a sweeping intellectualization of objectivity. Although he acknowledged a noumenal world that is “supersensible” or “unknowable” and that constitutes the originating source of the perceptions that his categories synthesize into authentic knowledge, he opened the way to an epistemological focus on systems of knowledge rather than a naturalistic focus on systems of facts. Facticity itself was absorbed within systems of knowledge, and the Greek onta, the “really existing things,” were displaced by episteme, our “knowledge” of the now “unknowable” onta. Hegel ridiculed the patent contradiction of knowing that an “unknowable” was unknowable — but Kant had dug a veritable trench around philosophy that excluded nature as ontology and that rendered thought into Being. With Kant’s agnostic and essentially skeptical outlook, his epistemological turn became absolutized in philosophy.

Lost in this development were the onta that alone constitute the underpinnings of nature philosophy, which now had to be distinguished from Kantian philosophies of the nature of knowing.[18] Hegel heaped scorn on the notion of the thing-in-itself, whose very thinghood by definition requires determinations and in fact bears the imprint of the Kantian categories. But even Hegel ended in the subjectivity of the Absolute. For Hegel, after all the toil of Spirit, object and subject finally come to rest in Mind — in knowledge as self-knowing in all its totality — and it was not for sentimental reasons that Hegel’s Encyclopedia ended, with a quotation from Aristotle that exults “thought [that] thinks on itself because it shares the notion of the object of thought.”[19] A century later, Husserl’s process of epoche bracketed out the natural world in order to establish the logical necessity on which it ultimately hangs; Heidegger regarded Dasein as the human existent and royal road to Being. Both distilled reality into intellection, and the formalizations of the human mind became the exclusive point of entry into Being. Only insofar as these formalizations become Being itself can one call Heidegger’s or Husserl’s philosophical strategy ontological.

Nor has ecological philosophy breached the Kantian trench. Rather, it is a captive within it without even knowing it. Gregory Bateson, the most widely read of its gurus, makes an almost wholly subjective interpretation of the notorious Mind-Nature relationship. In trying to “build the bridge” between “form and substance,” Bateson emphasizes only too correctly that Western science began with the “wrong half” of the chasm — atomistic materialism. Today many ecologically oriented readers are attracted to his supplantation of matter with mind and to his conjoining of fact (whatever that means for him) with value. But quite systematically, Bateson turns any interrelational system at all into “Mind” and hence makes it subjective. (This notion also feeds into quasi-super naturalistic visions of reality — generally Eastern in origin — which curiously tend to transcend the natural world rather than explain it.) That “Mind is empty; it is no-thing,” for Bateson, means literally that it is no thing at all. Hence, only “ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples [the material embodiments of ideas] are, again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the ‘thing in itself’ Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely, an example of something or other.”[20]

This is not merely a subjectivist variant of Kantianism; it is a denial of thinghood as such. A true son of the epistemological turn, Bateson claims that “all experience is subjective ... our brains make the images that we think we ‘perceive.’” Indeed, “occidental culture” lives under the “illusion” that its own “visual image of the external world” has ontological reality. Even as Bateson dismisses ontological properties as such, he smuggles them back into his own work as systems. Although his argument against “atomies” takes on the appearance of an argument against presuppositions, Bateson’s own view is actually overloaded with presuppositions — his whole thesis, he says elsewhere, is “based on the premise that mental function is immanent in the interaction of differentiated ‘parts’.” [21]

Batesonian mentalism is nourished by the cybernetic idea that perceptions are parts of a system, not isolates, or as Bateson calls them, “atomies.” He intends this to mean that the differentiae that form an aggregate of interacting parts are not spatial, temporal, or substantial; they are relational. The interaction between a subject and object forms a kind of unit system that exists within ever-larger systems, be they communities, societies, the planet, the solar system, or ultimately the universe. Bateson designates these systems as “Minds” — or more precisely, as a hierarchy of Minds,” much like Arthur Koestler’s holarchy, with its sublevels of “holons” that extend from subatomic particles, through atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, and organs, up to living organisms, which have their own scala naturae.[22]

Bateson’s view that context fixes meaning is not very new if one knows anything about Whitehead. But cybernetics, too, is uncritically presupposed. That cybernetics could simply be another form of mechanism — electronic rather than mechanical — eludes him, as it seems to elude most of its acolytes. Feedback loops are as mechanistic as flywheels, however different the physics involved may be. Cyberneticians engage in a reductionism similar to that which guided mechanical thinking in Newton’s day, except that Newton’s was based on matter rather than energy. The ecological cybernetics of Howard Odum, whose tunnel vision perceives only the flow of calories through an ecosystem, is as shallow philosophically as it is useful practically within its own narrow limits. For its more mystical acolytes, cybernetics combines with Eastern and Native American spirituality to become a “spiritual mechanism” that eerily parallels the failings of materialist mechanism, without the latter’s contact with reality. A deadening vocabulary of information, inputs, outputs, feedback, and energy — terminology largely born from wartime research on radar and servo-mechanisms for military guidance systems[23] — replaces such once-vibrant words as knowledge, dialogue, explanation, wisdom, and vitality.

As critics of Bateson’s view and of cybernetics generally have been quick to point out, hierarchies of “Mind” have authoritarian implications.[24] Koestler was acutely conscious of this problem in his notion of “holarchy,” with its hierarchies of “holons”;[25] but Bateson, if anything, is given to using examples that accentuate the authoritarian features of his outlook. As Bateson describes “an alternating ladder of calibration and feedback up to larger and larger spheres of relevance and more and more abstract information and wider decision,” he warns that

within the system of police and law enforcement, and indeed in all hierarchies, it is most undesirable to have direct contact between levels that are nonconsecutive. It is not good for the total organization to have a pipeline of communication between the driver of the automobile [who is ticketed for violating a speed limit] and the state police chief. Such communication is bad for the morale of the police force. Nor is it desirable for the policeman to have direct access to the legislature, which would undermine the authority of the police chief.... In legal and administrative systems, such jumping of logical levels is called ex post facto legislation. In families, the analogous errors are called double binds. In genetics, the Weissmannian barrier which prevents the inheritance of acquired characteristics seems to prevent disasters of this nature. To permit direct influence from somatic state to genetic structure might destroy the hierarchy of organization within the creature.[26]

This is sociobiology with a vengeance. Nor was one of the outstanding founders of systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, immune to this tendency when he observed that “the behavior of animals such as rats, cats, and monkeys provides the necessary bases for interpretation and control of human behavior; what appears to be special in man is secondary and ultimately to be reduced to biological drives and primary needs.”[27]

Bertalanffy’s “general system theory” — with which he seeks to replace Cartesian mechanism, “one-way causality, and “unorganized complexity” — hardly solves the problems that cybernetic mechanism raises. Ultimately, the thinking in both cases is similar: a general system theory based on a worldview of “organized complexity” is essentially a cybernetic system that is “open” rather than “closed.” Bertalanffy admits that general system theory is still mechanistic in the sense that it presupposes a “mechanism” that is, structural arrangements. Although it is quite true that “in behavioral parlance, the cybernetic model is the familiar S-R [stimulus-response] ... scheme” and simply replaces “linear causality” with “circular causality by way of the feedback loop,” the claims advanced by a general system theory to encompass “multivariable interaction maintenance of wholes in the counteraction of component parts, multilevel organization into systems of ever higher order, differentiation centralization, progressive mechanization steering and trigger causality, regulation evolution toward higher organization teleology and goal-directedness in various forms and ways, etc.,” are generally more programmatic than real and incorporate some of the most authoritarian and mechanistic attributes of cybernetics. That the “elaboration of this program has only just begun... and is beset with difficulties” is an understatement.[28]

The issue of development — specifically evolution — is crucial to nature philosophy, but a solution to the problem of why development occurs, why order and complexity emerge from lesser degrees of order and simplicity, remains markedly absent from systems theory. None of the systems theories come close to an explanation of development and it is not at all clear that the explanatory powers of cybernetics and systems theory can encompass it. To my knowledge, the only “breakthrough” in this regard that lends credibility to Bertalanffy’s sweeping claims for the explanatory potential of general system theory has been Ilya Prigogine’s mathematical elaboration of the organizing role of positive feedback.[29] Prigogines work essentially utilizes the symmetry-breaking effects of positive feedback (or more bluntly, disorder) as a means for creating “order” at various levels of organization.

As valuable as this approach may be within the realm of systems theory itself, particularly in its applications to chemistry, the spontaneous structuration that it describes does so as the result of causes no less mechanistic than Bateson s ladder of “Minds” and Koestler’s hierarchy of “holons.” Certainly, no systems theory I have cited explains why one “level of organization” supersedes or incorporates another; at best, they describe only how, and even these descriptions are woefully incomplete. Bateson’s stochastic strategy for “explaining” sequence, for example, merely correlates random genetic mutations (or worse, point mutations, which are piecemeal as well as random) with a “selective process” that is remarkably passive. Natural selection merely tells us that the “fittest” survive environmental changes. If all we know about evolutionary development is that amid a flurry of utterly random mutations, the organisms that are capable of surviving are those that are the “fittest” to survive — a circular thesis — then we know very little about evolution indeed.

It is not clear whether cybernetics and systems theory can extend beyond mere interaction, as distinguished from authentic development. We certainly have no “system” or “Mind” other than mere interaction that explains it in these theories. An “interaction” cannot be construed as a relationship unless it is meaningful. To call the mere physical fact that one human being stumbles over another “intersubjectivity,” for example, degrades the very meaning of the word subjective. The encounter of one body with another merely produces a form of physical contact. The “interaction” becomes “intersubjective” only when the two persons address each other — possibly with friendly recognition, possibly with expletives, possibly even with blows. Moreover, in view of recent “formalizations” of even radical social theories, I cannot emphasize too strongly that attempting to understand this “interaction” in all its possible forms and meanings requires knowing the social and psychological context in which it occurred — that is to say, the history or dialectic, however trivial, that lies buried within the “intersubjectivity” that results from the “interaction.”

---

We can certainly criticize cybernetics’ misuse of the concept of hierarchy — a strictly social term — to refer to degrees of complexity and organization. But ultimately, cybernetics and systems approaches to ecological issues are not subject to immanent critique. Like Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophies, they are basically self-sufficient and self-enclosed. Although Kant’s conclusions do not follow completely from his premises, his very errors have served as correctives for his successors. Translated into the language of systems theory, Kantianism and its subjective sequelae are sufficiently closed that their errors become the self-corrective source of perpetuating Kant’s “Copernican revolution?”

That Kant’s epistemological turn greatly broadened philosophical thought is hardly arguable. Kant’s elaboration of an epistemology and the introduction of the subject as both observer and participant in cohering knowledge and reality filled a major lacuna in Western philosophy. Definitely arguable, however, are the imperial claims that this subjectivism advanced, the totalization of reality and the arrogant exclusivity it staked out for itself. Hegel’s brilliant criticism of Kant, while indubitably shrewd, did not damage these imperial claims; indeed, to some degree it performed a corrective function for neo-Kantians of later generations.

If subjectivistic approaches to nature and those based on systems theory must be challenged, we are obliged to formulate new premises that provide coherence and meaning to natural evolution. The truth or falsity of a nature philosophy will lie in the truth or falsity of its description of an unfolding reality — in evolution, as we are beginning to know it in nature today, and as this natural evolution grades into social evolution and ethics. We must not, however, once again rear the hoary myth of a “presuppositionless philosophy” but choose our presuppositions carefully and adequately so that they impart coherence and meaning.

Our first presupposition is that we have the right to attribute properties to nature based on the best of our knowledge, the right to assume that certain attributes as well as contexts are self-evident in nature. This assumption is immediately problematic for a vast number of academic philosophers — although, ironically, it is no problem for most scientists. The great Renaissance notion that “matter” and “motion” are basic attributes of nature, its most underlying properties (just as metabolism is a basic property of life), remains a prevalent scientific assumption well into our own time, however much the meanings of the terms matter and motion have changed.

It remained for Diderot in his extraordinary D’Alembert’s Dream to propose the crucial trait of nature that transforms mere motion into development and directiveness: the notion of sensibilite, an internal nisus, that is commonly translated as “sensitivity.” [30] This immanent fecundity of “matter” — as distinguished from motion as mere change of place — scored a marked advance over the prevalent mechanism of La Mettrie and, by common acknowledgment, anticipated nineteenth-century theories of evolution and, in my view, recent developments in biology. Yet D’Alembert’s Dream’s very title forewarns readers of Diderot’s candid sense of doubt of his own “likely story,” given the limited scientific knowledge of the time.

Sensibilite implies an active concept of matter that yields increasing complexity, from the atomic level to the brain. Continuity is preserved through this development without any reductionism; indeed, in the scala naturae dynamized by Diderot’s avowed Heraclitean bias for flux, there is a nisus for complexity, an entelechia that emerges from the very nature, structure, and form of potentiality itself, given varying degrees of the organization of “matter.” From this potentiality and the actualization of the potentialities of various organisms, sensibilite initiates its journey of self-actualization and emergent form. Diderot’s holism, in turn, is one of the most conspicuous features of *D’Alembert’s Drea*m. An organism achieves its unity and sense of direction from the contextual wholeness of which it is part, a wholeness that imparts directiveness to the organism and reciprocally receives directiveness from it.

Apart from their systematic and mathematical treatment of feedback, cybernetics and systems theory can add little to this idea, advanced by an authentic and largely unacknowledged genius who died almost two centuries ago. Not only did the active and directive “matter” that Diderot advanced with his notion of sensibilite mark a radical breach with Renaissance and Enlightenment mechanism, but its relevance as “sensitivity,” however metaphoric the terminology, is radically important for understanding current developments in natural science.

A second presupposition is the alternative pathway to Kantianism that Hegel opened up with his own phenomenological strategy in the richly dialectical approach of the Phenomenology of Spirit * In Hegel’s own description of this strategy: insofar as the Phenomenology “has only phenomenal knowledge for its object, this exposition seems not to be Science, free and self-moving in its own peculiar shape; yet from this standpoint it can be regarded as the path of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge; or as the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself.” This “pressing forward” is immanent to true knowledge, for short of finding its goal, “no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations along the way.”[31]

Like Lukács, and unlike the academic fluff who have vitiated Hegel’s strong reality principle, I share Engels’s view that the Phenomenology may be regarded as “a parallel of the embryology and the paleontology of the mind, a development of individual consciousness through its different stages, set in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history.”[32] To a remarkable extent, although by no means consistently, the self-movement of consciousness in the Phenomenology parallels the self-movement of consciousness in historical reality, although the strategy is captive to rational reality and the ethical universe it opens for ecology.

Taking as our presuppositions Diderot’s concept of sensibilite in “matter” and Hegel’s phenomenological strategy, we emerge with a fascinating possibility. Speaking metaphorically, it is nature itself that seems to “write” natural philosophy and ethics, not logicians, positivists, neo-Kantians, and heirs of Galilean scientism. According to a fairly recent revolution in astrophysics (possibly comparable to the achievements of Copernicus and Kepler), the cosmos is opening itself up to us in new ways that demand an exhilaratingly speculative turn of mind and a more qualitative approach to natural phenomena than in the past. It is becoming increasingly tenable to hold that the entire universe is the cradle of life — not merely our own planet or possibly planets like it. The formation of all the elements from hydrogen and helium, their combination into small molecules and later into self-forming macromolecules, and finally the organization of these macromolecules into the constituents of life and possibly mind follow a sequence that challenges Bertrand Russell’s image of humanity as an accidental spark in a meaningless void. The presence of complex organic molecules in the vast reaches of the universe is replacing the classical image of space as a void with an understanding of space as a restlessly active chemogenic ground for an astonishing sequence of increasingly complex chemical compounds. Recent theories about the formation of DNA that are modeled on the activity of crystalline replication (a notion advanced as early as 1944 by Erwin Schrodinger) suggest how genetic guidance and evolution itself might have emerged to form an Interface between the inorganic and organic.[33]

The point is that we can no longer be satisfied with the theory of an inert “matter” that fortuitously aggregates into life. The universe bears witness to a developing — not merely moving — substance, whose most dynamic and creative attribute is its unceasing capacity for self-organization into increasingly complex forms. Form plays a central role in this developmental and growth process, while function is an indispensable correlate. The orderly universe that makes science possible and its highly concise logic — mathematics — meaningful presupposes the correlation of form with function.

In life — a graded development beyond the chemogenic crucible that we call the universe — metabolism and development establish another elaboration of sensibilite: symbiosis. Recent data support the applicability of Peter Kropotkin’s mutualistic naturalism not only to relationships between species but among complex cellular forms. As biologist William Trager ironically remarked a decade ago about the “struggle for existence” and the “survival of the fittest”: “few people realize that mutual cooperation between different kinds of organisms — symbiosis — is just as important, and that the ‘fittest may be the one that most helps another to survive.”[34]

Indeed, the cellular structure of all multicellular organisms is itself testimony to a symbiotic arrangement that renders complex life-forms possible. The eukaryotic cell — a cell that makes up an organism — is a highly functional symbiotic arrangement of the less complex and more primal prokaryotes, or single-celled organisms, and evolved in an anaerobic world long before our highly oxygenated atmosphere was formed. The work of Lynn Margulis gives us reason to believe that eukaryotic flagella derived from anaerobic spirochetes; that mitochondria derived from prokaryotic bacteria that were capable of respiration as well as fermentation; and that plant chloroplasts derived from blue-green algae (cyanobacteria).[35]

If Manfred Eigen is correct that evolution “appears to be an inevitable event, given the presence of certain matter with specified autocatalytic properties and under the maintenance of the finite (free) energy flow [solar energy] necessary to compensate for the steady production of energy,” then our very concept of matter has to be radically revised.[36] The prospect that life and all its attributes are latent in matter as such, that biological evolution is deeply rooted in symbiosis or mutualism, suggests that what we call matter is actually active substance.

The traditional dualism between the living and nonliving worlds, between organisms and their abiotic ecosystems, is being replaced with the more challenging notion that life “makes much of its own environment,” to use Margulis’s words. From an ecological viewpoint, in which life is in its environment and not isolated from, it, the Weissmannian barrier that conveniently separates genetic from somatic changes ceases to be meaningful. “Certain properties of the atmosphere, sediments, and hydrosphere are controlled by and for the biosphere”; by comparing lifeless planets such as Mars and Venus with the Earth, Margulis notes that the high concentration of oxygen in our atmosphere is anomalous in contrast with the carbon dioxide atmospheres of other planets. Moreover, “the concentration of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere remains constant in the presence of nitrogen, methane, hydrogen, and other potential reactants.” Life-forms, in effect, play an active role in maintaining a relatively constant supply of free oxygen molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. If the anomalies of the Earth’s atmosphere “are far from random,” much the same can be said for the temperature of the Earth’s surface and the salinity of its oceans, whose stability seems to be a function of life on the planet. The “natural selection” of Darwinian evolution may itself be the product of life-forms, which presumably filter out some genetic changes.[37]

Even the Modern Synthesis, the neo-Darwinian model of organic evolution that has been in force since the early 1940s, has been challenged as too narrow and perhaps too mechanistic in its outlook. Its thesis of slow-paced evolutionary change emerging from the interplay of small variations, which are “selected” for their adaptability to the environment, is no longer as tenable as it once seemed based on the fossil record. Evolution seems instead to have been rather more sporadic, marked by occasional changes of considerable rapidity, then long periods of stasis. The “Effect Hypothesis,” advanced by Elizabeth Vrba, suggests that evolution includes an immanent striving, not merely random mutational changes filtered by external selective factors. As one observer notes, “Whereas species selection puts the forces of change on environmental conditions, the Effect Hypothesis looks to internal parameters that affect the rates of speciation and extinction.”[38]

Indeed, the theory of small, gradual point mutations (a theory that accords with the Victorian notion of strictly fortuitous evolutionary change, much like the Victorian image of the economic marketplace) can be challenged on genetic grounds alone. Not only genes but chromosomes, too, may be altered chemically and mechanically.. Genetic changes may range from “simple” point mutations, through jumping genes and transposable elements, to major chromosomal rearrangements. Major morphological changes may thus result from mosaics of genetic change. This dynamic raises the intriguing possibility of a directiveness to genetic change itself, not simply a promiscuous and purely fortuitous randomness, and an environment largely created by life itself, not by forces exclusively external to it.

Neither mysticism nor anthropocentrism is involved in an ecological view that ontologically graides natural history into social history without sacrificing the unity of either. Nor is it a supernatural fallacy to ultimately derive the human brain from an actively chemogenic universe that is self-forming and immanently entelechial. Although Hans Driesch gave entelechy a bad name, the concept derives from Aristotle, not from Driesch’s confused neo vitalism.

The fallacies of classical Greek cosmology generally lie less in its ethical orientation than in its dualistic view of nature. For all its emphasis on speculation at the expense of experimentation, ancient cosmology erred most when it tried to join the self-organizing, fecund nature it had inherited from the Ionians with a vitalizing force alien to the natural world itself. The self-organizing properties of nature were replaced with Parmenides’ Dike — like Bergson’s elan vital, a latently dualistic cosmology that could not trust nature to develop on its own spontaneous grounds, any more than ruling social and political strata trust the body politic to manage its own affairs.

These archaisms, with their theological nuances and their tightly formulated teleologies, have been justly viewed as socially reactionary traps. They tainted the works of Aristotle and Hegel as surely as they mesmerized the medieval Schoolmen. Classical nature philosophy erred not in its project of trying to elicit an ethics from nature, but in the spirit of domination that poisoned it from the start with an often authoritarian, supernatural arbiter who weighed and corrected the imbalances or “injustices” that erupted in nature. The ancient gods were still worshiped in the classical era, even after Heraclitus; they had to be exorcized by the Enlightenment before an ethical continuum between nature and humanity could be rendered more meaningful and “democratic.” Late Renaissance thought initiated a new, more rational connection between nature and humanity. Beginning with Galileo and the new scientific societies that were emerging, the way was opened to the increasingly democratic participation of everyone in the discovery of truth. All men — and later women — could now participate in unearthing knowledge, and the veracity of the facts they discovered could be judged freely by the merits of their work, not by their social status.

Today, we may well be able to permit nature — not Dike, God, Spirit, or an elan vital — to open itself up to us as the ground for an ethics on its own terms. Contemporary science’s greatest achievement is the growing evidence it provides that randomness is subject to a directive ordering principle. Mutualism is a good by virtue of its function in fostering the evolution of natural variety and complexity. We require no Dike to affirm community as a desideratum in nature and society. Similarly, the claims of freedom are validated by what Hans Jonas so perceptively called the “inwardness” of life-forms, their “organic identity” and “adventure of form.” The effort, venture, indeed self-recognition that every living being exercises in the course of “its precarious metabolic continuity” to preserve itself reveals — even in the most rudimentary of organisms — a sense of identity and selective activity that Jonas appropriately called evidence of “germinal freedom.”[39]

“Open systems,” “minds,” and “holons” may explain the disequilibria that change cybernetic and general systems, but we must invariably fall back on inherent attributes of substance — notably, the motion, form, and sensibilite of “matter” — to account for the development of nature toward complexity, specialization, and consciousness. This necessity runs counter to every bias on current philosophy, which would ignore the fact of directiveness or endow it with human traits like purposiveness when it is simply a tendency that inheres in the organization of substance as potentiality.

---

The presuppositions I have made here are not arbitrary. The validity of a presupposition must be tested against the real dialectic of natural development — substance “free and self-moving in its own peculiar shape” — and not against the “atomies” of data and statistical probabilities adduced by empirical observation. On this score at least, contextualists like Whitehead and Bateson are quite sound in their claim that facts do not exist on their own but are always relational or interactive, to use Diderot’s more germinal word.

Admittedly, this approach to a nature philosophy may seem as self-enclosed as the Kantian approach. But I have not faulted Kantian, neo-Kantian, or for that matter, cybernetic and positivistic theories for their internal unity or their impregnability to immanent criticism. My objection to them is their claim to universality, since their presuppositions provide an inadequate framework for understanding natural history and apprehending its ethical implications.

Finally, the study of nature exhibits a self-evolving nisus so to speak, that is implicitly ethical. Mutualism, freedom, and subjectivity are not solely human values or concerns. They appear, however germinally, in larger cosmic or organic processes, but they require no Aristotelian God to motivate them, no Hegelian Spirit to vitalize them. If social ecology can provide a coherent focus on the unity of mutualism, freedom, and subjectivity as aspects of a cooperative society that is free of domination and guided by reflection and reason, it will have removed the difficulties that have plagued naturalistic ethics for so long. No longer would a Cartesian and Kantian dualism leave nature inert and mind isolated from the world around it. We would see that mind, far from being sui generis in a world that is wholly external to it, has a natural history that spans the sensibilite of the inorganic and the conceptual capacities of the human brain. To weaken community, to arrest the spontaneity of a self-organizing reality toward ever-greater complexity and rationality as nature rendered self-conscious, would be to deny our heritage in its evolutionary processes and dissolve our uniqueness in the world of life.

Mutualism, self-organization, freedom, and subjectivity, cohered by social ecology’s principles of unity in diversity, spontaneity, and nonhierarchical relationships, are constitutive of evolution’s potentialities. Aside from the ecological responsibilities they confer on our species as the self-reflexive voice of nature, they literally define us. Nature does not “exist” for us to use, but it makes possible our uniqueness. Like the concept of Being, these principles of social ecology require not analysis but merely verification. They are the elements of an ethical ontology, not rules of a game that can be changed to suit personal needs and interests.