Dialectical Naturalism: Its Utility and Its Shortcomings

So, you googled Murray Bookchin. Time to pay the price.

If you would prefer to listen to an audio recording of this essay, click here.

My last essay was a rather ambivalent collection of thoughts about Murray Bookchin’s landmark work, The Ecology of Freedom. It’s a difficult book to have strong opinions about because the book itself feels so incomplete. Bookchin readily acknowledges that he doesn’t have all the answers, and merely points us in a few useful directions, alongside a bunch of conjectural ideas about the history of early humanity which are, well, dated to say the least.

However, the book was written relatively early in Bookchin’s career, throughout most of the 1970s, and he wrote much afterwards. His 1996 essay collection The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism is in many respects just a recap of much of Ecology of Freedom. It also continues Bookchin’s characteristic style of going into extensive dialogue with various intellectuals without precisely explaining what he and his generally silent interlocutor are actually talking about. When he does provide quotes, it’s usually in the context of a polemic (Bookchin’s word for much of this book, not mine) decrying what he saw as fascistic or New Age spiritualist tendencies within the then-sort-of-relevant “Deep Ecology” movement. Thus, much of this book is ultimately about things no present-day reader knows or cares about-this reader included. There’s also a rather cringey section in which Bookchin pretty much dismisses the entire Eastern philosophical tradition, continuing his lifelong insistence that, despite the pesky slavery and brutal subjugation of women, the Greeks were the best thing since primitive communism, and anything that isn’t directly descended from their philosophical tradition is obviously garbage.

This is all par for the course for Bookchin, and having read as much of his work as I have, it’s almost charming in the way it’s charming when my 92 year old grandmother tells me I should really consider taking Adult Faith Formation courses. Bookchin feels to me like my hilariously cantankerous communist grandfather I never had, raving about the libs, eco-fascists and postmodernists with a ferocity that would make Jordan Peterson blush.

However, where the book offers genuine value is as a supplement to the theoretical groundwork of Ecology of Freedom-appropriately enough, better articulating and expanding the philosophy of Bookchin’s social ecology. Specifically, it does a decent and, for Bookchin at least, concise job of explaining the philosophical underpinning of social ecology, which Bookchin refers to as “dialectical naturalism.”

Bookchin’s first essay in the book, A Philosophical Naturalism, defines the theoretical capability of dialectical naturalism as follows:

This dialectical naturalism offers an alternative to an ecology movement that rightly distrusts conventional reason. It can bring coherence to ecological thinking, and it can dispel arbitrary and anti-intellectual tendencies toward the sentimental, cloudy, and theistic at best and the dangerously antirational, mystical, and potentially reactionary at worst. As a way of reasoning about reality, dialectical naturalism is organic enough to give a more liberatory meaning to vague words like interconnectedness and holism without sacrificing intellectuality. It can answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this essay: what nature is, humanity’s place in nature, the thrust of natural evolution, and society’s relationship with the natural world. Equally important, dialectical naturalism adds an evolutionary perspective to ecological thinking — despite Hegel’s rejection of natural evolution and Engels’s recourse to the mechanistic evolutionary theories of a century ago. Dialectical naturalism discerns evolutionary phenomena fluidly and plastically, yet it does not divest evolution of rational interpretation. Finally, a dialectic that has been “ecologized,” or given a naturalistic core, and a truly developmental understanding of reality could provide the basis for a living ecological ethics.

For our purposes here, it’s that last bit about ethics I’m curious about. So then, what is dialectical naturalism?

Defining Dialectical Naturalism

The “dialectical” bit is a massive iceberg to navigate around, so lets get it out of the way. Bookchin’s dialectic is very firmly grounded in Hegel’s dialectic, and that is a subject I’m not competent to speak on. But fortunately, Bookchin explains what dialectic means to him, and that’s what matters. As Bookchin explains:

Dialectical reason, unlike conventional reason, acknowledges the developmental nature of reality by asserting in one fashion or another that A equals not only A but also not-A. The dialectical thinker who examines the human life-cycle sees an infant as a self-maintaining human identity while simultaneously developing into a child, from a child into an adolescent, from an adolescent into a youth, and from a youth into an adult. Dialectical reason grasps not only how an entity is organized at a particular moment but how it is organized to go beyond that level of development and become other than what it is, even as it retains its identity. The contradictory nature of identity — notably, that A equals both A and not-A — is an intrinsic feature of identity itself. The unity of opposites is, in fact, a unity qua the emerging “other” what Hegel called “the identity of identity and nonidentity”

In the most plain terms, the “dialectical” of “dialectical naturalism” refers to “dialectical reason,” which could be defined as a type of reasoning in terms of change and developmental processes.

For what it’s worth, fellow non-academics will likely find this youtube video by Prof. Hans-Georg Moeller extremely helpful in explaining what dialectic is, as the way Bookchin describes it makes an outside primer on Hegelian dialectic virtually essential.

What about “naturalism,” then, differentiates dialectical naturalism from other dialectical models, such as Hegelian dialectic, or Marx and Engels’ much more famous dialectical materialism?

Dialectical naturalism… conceives finiteness and contradiction as distinctly natural in the sense that things and phenomena are incomplete and unactualized in their development — not “imperfect” in any idealistic or supranatural sense. Until they are what they have been constituted to become, they exist in a dynamic tension. A dialectical naturalist view has nothing to do with the supposition that things or phenomena fail to approximate a Platonic ideal or a Scholastic God. Rather, they are still in the process of becoming or, more mundanely, developing. Dialectical naturalism thus does not terminate in a Hegelian Absolute at the end of a cosmic developmental path, but rather advances the vision of an ever-increasing wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation and subjectivity.

Hegel’s dialectic is moving towards a spiritually predefined perfection. Bookchin’s, on the other hand, simply is what it is. When Bookchin calls himself a naturalist, what he really means is he is a physicalist-he believes there is only nature, only things existing in the physical world. He isn’t a materialist, because he does not believe in anonymous matter, lacking structure and identity-a rather ridiculous idea when you actually think about it, and one he explicitly rejects as the “wooden” ontological framework of Marxism. Rather, what you see is what you get, and whatever meaning there is to be derived from it is immanent in its appearance. Bookchin wants to derive ethical meaning from extant reality, with no god or absolutely perfect metaphysical ideal world of forms to contrast it against. He despises existentialism, and by extension its ethical framework of moral relativism.

Dialectical naturalism could thus be defined as an analytical framework for deriving answers to philosophical questions from thinking about reality as a developmental process.

Dialectical Naturalism and the Nature of Moral Truth

Bookchin’s dialectical model offers a genuinely different conception of the nature of moral truth, one in which that truth remains indiscernible as a matter of verifiable fact, but is nevertheless confirmed to exist. There is order in the universe, but it is not Absolute-that is to say, it is developmental and adductive, subject to constant change and revision. It is, in short, a dialectic of nature.

That said, Bookchin’s presentation of his theory, in my opinion, verges on the disingenuous, and never quite adds up. He simultaneously claims to have devised a method for the formation of an objective ethics based on a dialectical analysis of nature, but scoffs at Hume’s “is/ought” argument in the following, absolutely bewildering passage from another essay in Philosophy of Social Ecology, entitled Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach:

We are even witnessing a revival of Hume’s “is-ought” criticism, which denies speculative thought the right to reason from the “what-is” to the “what-should-be.” This positivistic mousetrap is a problem not in logic but in ethics — notably, the right of the ethical “should-be” to enjoy an objective status. The problem of constituting an objective ethics, which confounded the Frankfurt School, is no less serious than Hume’s quarrel with organized religion. Speculative philosophy by definition claims that reason can project beyond the given state of affairs, whether to Plato’s exemplary domain of forms or Marx and Kropotkin’s visions of a cooperative society. To remain within the “what-is” in the name of logical consistency is to deny reason the right to assert goals, values, and social relationships that provide a voice to the claims of ecology as a social discipline.

Somehow, Bookchin hopes that by reframing reason in developmental rather than static terms, he can make ethical claims that are somehow grounded in dialectical reason. But whenever he comes close to addressing the clear problem here-how to actually verify one’s ethical claims via dialectical naturalism-he waffles marvelously. Consider an earlier, equally bewildering passage where Bookchin handles this argument directly.

One may well question the validity of dialectical reason by challenging the concept of Wirklichkeit, and its claims to be more adequate than Realität. Indeed, I am often asked: “How do you know that what you call a distorted ‘untrue’ or ‘inadequate’ reality is not the vaunted ‘actuality’ that constitutes the authentic realization of a potentiality? Are you not simply making a private moral judgment about what is ‘untrue’ or ‘inadequate’ and denying the importance of immediate facts that do not support your personal notion of the ‘true’ and the ‘adequate’?”

This question is based on the purely conventional concepts of validity used by analytical logic. “Immediate facts” — or more colloquially, “brute facts” — are no less slippery than the empirical reality to which conventional reason confines itself. In the first place, it is not relevant to determine the validity of a process by “testing” it against “brute facts” that are themselves the epistemological products of a philosophy based on fixities. A logic premised on the principle of identity, A equals A, can hardly be used to test the validity of a logic premised on the principle A equals A and not-A. The two are simply incommensurable. For analytical logic, the premises of dialectical logic are nonsense; for dialectical logic, the premises of analytical logic ossify facticity into hardened, immutable logical “atoms.” In dialectical reason, “brute facts” are distortions of reality since Being is not an agglomeration of fixed entities and phenomena but is always in flux, in a state of Becoming. One of the principal purposes of dialectical reason is to explain the nature of Becoming, not simply to explore a fixed Being.

Accordingly, the validity of a concept derived from a developmental process rather than from “brute facts” must be “tested “ only by_examining that developmental process, particularly the structure of the potentiality from which the process emerges and the logic that can be inferred from its potentialities. The validity of conclusions that are derived from conventional reason and experience can certainly be tested by fixed “brute facts”; hence the great success of, say, structural engineering. But to try to test the validity of actualities that derive from a dialectical exploration of potentialities and their internal logic by using “brute facts” would be like trying to analyze the emergence of a fetus in the same way that one analyzes the design and construction of a bridge. Real developmental processes must be tested by a logic of processes, not by a logic of “brute facts” that is analytical, based on a datum or fixed phenomenon.

It must be obvious to Bookchin that his response to the question he himself poses is utterly beside the point. The question is not whether or not analytical reason can be used to evaluate dialectical claims, but how we know these dialectical claims are actually grounded in the processes from which they claim to be derived. What is this “logic of processes,” and how is it to be applied to ethical claims? This, really the only question which would turn dialectical naturalism into a method of arriving at truth and not simply a way of pointing out the shortcomings of analytical reason, goes stubbornly unanswered by Bookchin in The Philosophy of Social Ecology. The reason, I suspect, is that he is simply unable to answer it.

Let’s take for granted the idea that rationality is demonstrated by wirklichkeit, by the actualization of potentialities. How on earth are we to know which potentialities are ethical, and which are not? Surely one can simultaneously have the potential to be a very competent carpenter or a very competent carpet-bomber-what does dialectical naturalism have to tell us about the wirklich which actually counts as wirklich, and which is an irrational deviation from the dialectic?

I’m being rather brutal here, and I’m being brutal precisely because I like the idea of dialectical naturalism so much, and I simply think we have to be honest about what its limits actually are. Dialectical naturalism rejects the idea of Absolute Truth, the teleological end of all dialectical conflict, where we reach total harmony. Absolute Truth exists, in Hegelian dialectic, as a lingering potentiality waiting to be realized, and thus can be said to exist in the way a bird exists in an egg, or a statue in a block of marble. 

Bookchin makes it clear that he doesn’t believe this is the case, because Bookchin isn’t a spiritualist-for Bookchin, the closest we get to “perfection” is an infinitely expanding and elaborating complexity, the “fecundity” he’s so meme-worthily obsessed with. Potentiality certainly does exist-the physical potential to make a bird is to be readily found in a fertilized egg, just like the potential to be one of a million different professions is to be found in a human’s body and brain. Truth, then, is contingent upon the material world-the material world is not contingent upon truth. And thus, if reality (the real reality) is dialectical, truth too is dialectical. It changes, develops into greater complexity alongside the reality it is derived from. It is objective, but it isn’t absolute.

In his earlier work, The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin embraced Aristotelian final causality as a source of ethical truth-nature always strives towards the better, and thus whatever nature strives towards must be good, right? Wrong! 

I cannot emphasize too strongly that nature itself is not an ethics; it is the matrix for an ethics, the source of ethical meaning that can be rooted in objective reality. Hence nature, even as the matrix and source of ethical meaning, does not have to assume such delightfully human attributes as kindness, virtue, goodness and gentleness; nature need merely be fecund and creative — a source rather than a "paradigm."

On its own, this is sensible enough. But how does this “creativity” function? The nature of human interpretation of phenomena is that it varies, and if Bookchin is to be believed when he speaks of dialectical naturalism as a source for an “objectively grounded” ethics, in each case one interpretation will be right and the others will be wrong. How do we know which is which? I don’t think he wants to say it, but at the end of the day, it sounds like it all just comes down to vibes, man.

The Vibing Out of Social Ecology

“Vibes,” my way of referring to the common experience of ethical judgements made on the basis of “I dunno man, just feels right to me,” is what Bookchin ultimately returns to again and again. And in fairness, I think that’s true of virtually any moral philosophy that isn’t based on belief in a god-and if you believe in god, you’re the vibey-est of them all as far as I can tell. For Bookchin, good vibes come from things like unity in diversity, complementarity, usufruct, self-actualization-in short, that sweet, juicy fecundity.

I have no problem with vibing out one’s ethics-indeed, I think that’s the only honest way to do it, and I actually think it’s quite difficult to avoid doing. You can even have a dialectic between conflicting vibes! But while we can insist that there is an objective truth, one which could theoretically be metaphysically derived from an analysis of a dialectical process, dialectical naturalism is not going to be the tool which tells us what it is in any scientific way, any more than Kant’s categorical imperative or Aristotle’s golden mean. All of these systems or epistemological devices are, in fact, post hoc rationalizations of beliefs that are, at the end of the day, little more than vibes. Like these other systems, dialectical naturalism gives us a vague idea of what such a truth might be-in this case, inhering to a certain stage in a developmental process. 

In this case, I think dialectical naturalism is a valid way of arguing that a given ethical claim, whatever it may be, could only be true based on a certain set of circumstances, at a given time, and in a given place, rather than at all times and in all places. In this sense, Bookchin succeeds in rescuing us from a postmodern miasma on the one hand, and religious fundamentalism on the other. What dialectical naturalism itself cannot tell us is what this more flexible, resilient form of truth actually is, anymore than the golden mean could tell us what the bounds of ethical action in which we are to discern a mean are. In this sense, it falls short of its stated goal, but I’m nevertheless fascinated by the possibility of a more systematic process for implementing dialectical reason in a practical capacity, something which I hadn’t thought about seriously in the past and which deserves more study.

(As a post-script: should I start ending these essays with the phrase “Fecundly Yours” or “In Earnest Fecundity” or something like that? I think with everything going on, we could all really use some more fecund in our lives.)