Analytic philosophy rarely relates to culture at large. But one trend provides insight into how bone-dry epistemology or metaphysics may actually relate to the way we view the world and our place in it.
This year Thomas Nagel, a prolific philosopher of mind and ethics, is publishing Cosmos and Mind, a critique of neo-Darwinian materialism. Nagel’s critique can be seen as part of a broader critique of philosophical naturalism. Naturalism, in this sense, is the kind of philosophy which places most of its justification and explanation on the natural sciences. For example, materialism asserts that reality is ultimately composed of the sorts of entities physics says are there, i.e. material ones. Philosophers as unlike each other as Timothy Williamson and Jerry Fodor have argued recently that, one way or another, naturalism is flawed.
It is a cliché to say we live in a world which highly values science and technology, but I’ll say it anyway. We worship science and technology. This manifests itself everywhere: predictions that social media will liberate humanity from totalitarian governments; neuropsychology will locate in our brain the ideas of God or love; evolution will give us an explanation for morality. However, if naturalism is as problematic as Nagel and others assert, one of this era’s deepest convictions may also be in jeopardy.
We’re not in the first epoch where science is thought to be doing most of the explaining; the 17th century holds that honor. The story is familiar. Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism. Descartes and Locke gave way to Fichte and Hegel. Crudely reductive metaphysics gave way to woolly-headed meditations on geist. Unfortunately, matter, perception and natural laws weren’t going to make scepticism disappear or explain consciousness in scientific terms. Absolute Idealism and Romanticism retreated into a vague world of ever unfolding dialectics and meditations on will and spirit, which the next generation of scientific advancement made seem quaint and folksy.One failed to accommodate the explanandum (things like human minds or knowledge) in the explanation (science) while the other failed to accommodate the explanandum with our best means of explaining.
This conflict wasn’t just philosophical, it bled into the whole worldview. Turgenev captured the conflict between the naturalistic and Romantic worldviews in Fathers and Sons. Bazarov, for all his ardent faith in science and human progress at the hands of technology, couldn’t reach out and bond with anyone around him and ended up renouncing existence for the least scientific reason possible: love.
Back to naturalism and culture today. Upon closer (or even mild) scrutiny, many appeals to science end up looking childish at best. This is most apparent in the realm of evolutionary psychology. Think of Naomi Wolf’s recent claim that lighting candles, snuggling, and making tender love are behaviors ingrained in us from the sexual congress of cavemen . Outside wild speculation couched in scientific-sounding vocabulary she offers no real argument for her position (Zoe Heller argues as much in her review of the book). Or recall Jonnathan Haidt’s calling the post-Bin Laden assassination celebrations “good, healthy and even altruistic” because they were an example of our evolutionary need for “collective effervescence”. This appeal to evolutionary psychology in ethics isn’t just disturbing, it is philosophically sloppy. It requires an entirely tactless blundering from “so-and-so is what chimps do” to “so-and-so is what humans ought to do” and then brazenly relocates moral discourse in speculations about past primates behavior, rather than a rational engagement with our current values and reasons.
What is most striking about people like Wolf and Haidt is that they seem to assume that, purely by virtue of invoking a scientific claim, they have provided all the argument they need. Perhaps they’re simply tapping into the naturalism of our age. But one doesn’t need to read Nagel or be a seasoned philosopher to spot the flaws in their reasoning. And one doesn’t need to look very far to see that there is less naturalistic hubris than is often assumed.
Contemporary literature, much like that of the 19th century, reflects a lot of our growing malaise about naturalism. Murakami’s work deals with the paucity of the scientific worldview. His characters escape bleak, deterministic, suburban worlds into ones where concepts get up and talk, where spirits leave the body to sleep with absent lovers, and where rice pudding spontaneously becomes macaroni gratin in the microwave. David Mitchell and Michel Houellebecq similarly visit themes about science, technology, determinism, alienation, and the insatiable need for woolly-headed geist-ridden human values. They may not be reading each other, but I’d like to think Nagel and Murakami are participating in the same dialogue.