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Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once stated in this way hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history.
All branches of modern science, of true and disinterested science, concur in proclaiming this grand truth, fundamental and decisive: The social world, properly speaking, the human world—in short, humanity—is nothing other than the last and supreme development—at least on our planet and as far as we know—the highest manifestation of animality. But as every development necessarily implies a negation, that of its base or point of departure, humanity is at the same time and essentially the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man; and it is precisely this negation, as rational as it is natural, and rational only because natural—at once historical and logical, as inevitable as the development and realization of all the natural laws in the world—that constitutes and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual and moral convictions, ideas.
Back in 2015, when I was living in Maine in a quasi-commune of primitivists, a friend and I were on a walk, and he pointed at some rapids. Over the sound of the pounding water, he asked me with genuine perplexity, “how can you say that that isn’t alive?!”
I remember how this lit a little candle of doubt in my mind. The rapids weren’t alive, but nonetheless, it was difficult to see the clearcut division between them and something which was.
The passage quoted above is the dramatic opening of God and the State, the most complete and sophisticated work by classical anarchist Michael Bakunin, published posthumously in 1882. It serves as a remarkable benchmark in naturalistic or materialist philosophy, and a passage at once ahead of and very much of its time. A neglected tradition, we can derive in this passage much which modern naturalist philosophy seems to still be in the process of rediscovering.
Due to developments in the sciences, materialism gradually evolved into physicalism-the belief that all that exists is the physical. Another, less sterile term, is ontological naturalism, which means the same thing. All of these contain the following assertions:
there is nature-nature is what’s happening,
there’s nothing but nature-only nature is happening, and
there’s certainly no supernature-nothing outside of nature is making nature happen
To be clear, nature here is not limited to that which is alive, or that which is non-human. Our inconsistent colloquial and even formal definitions of nature have been the cause of much confusion in thinking about nature and where we stand in relation to it, so I will put it simply: nature is all that there is. If it exists, it is nature.
The oft-accepted position among philosophers is that within the naturalist framework, concepts like good and evil, or the meaning of life, are indefensible-all attempts to do so rely on fallacies, or sheer superstition.
The worldview this implies can creep over from the relatively neutral physicalism or ontological naturalism, and become what Alex Rosenberg unabashedly acknowledges as “Scientism” (adopting a term usually applied as a pejorative). In the deceptively titled Atheist’s Guide to Reality (a book which sounds far less intellectually deft than it actually is), Rosenberg sketches the Scientistic worldview in the most provocative terms he could manage:
Is there a God? No.
What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.
What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.
What is the meaning of life? Ditto.
Why am I here? Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work? Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?
Is there free will? Not a chance.
What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.
Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.
What is love, and how can I find it? Love is a solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it.
And so on-you get the idea. Rosenberg’s thesis is simple: science describes nature pretty well, and if we stop running away from the implications of that, the philosophical conclusions are pretty straightforward-the remarkable thing is how much we twist ourselves in knots to get around them. The truth is that there is no meaning in life, but while we may be forced into nihilism, the good news is that we can be “nice nihilists”-people who behave virtuously because most people are simply hardwired to do so, sharing a “core morality” which tends to crop up in every human society. If you find those conclusions depressing, Rosenberg’s answer is similarly brutal, and similarly direct: you probably need to get on antidepressants. If your antidepressants aren’t working, you probably need to try others, until you find some that do.
And yet, the religious impulse in human beings persists. However satisfyingly closed and self-sufficient the scientistic worldview may appear to be, we are still humans, and Matthew 4:4 has not lost its ring of truth-“Man shall not live by bread alone”. As Viktor Frankl observed (drawing on his own experience in the Holocaust) in his famous work Man’s Search For Meaning, the sense of meaning in life is in many respects more powerful for sustaining life than food and water. Those who lack it, lack some animating power, which while surely reducible to physical constituents (“fermions and bosons,” as Rosenberg repeatedly describes the whole of reality) nonetheless seems, on the scientistic worldview, to hinge on something supernatural-the “ought” that seems to bubble its way out of a morass of “is”. Everyone has encountered this, from the pediatric doctor who dies in his sleep a week after retiring to the old woman who passes away a few months after the death of her husband. There are very few people who can get through life without a reason for all the trouble, however contrived.
I’ve made much of the need to eradicate the religious impulse. I stick to that-it’s akin to pounding a nail with a jackhammer, a bit too much tool for the job. Religious dogma, rooted in idealistic philosophy which by definition cleaves the spiritual from the natural, has served as an escape hatch for meaning while sharing the nihilistic inclination of materialist thinkers, freeing it from the confines of nature and allowing us to imagine another, better world which exists in some supernatural realm. If one can simply convince oneself to believe in this other world, one has access to transcendent meaning. The problem, once one has been struck over the head with the scientistic club, is getting over the nagging awareness that you’re kidding yourself.
Up until now I’ve used the term “meaning” and “transcendent meaning” synonymously, and I think it’s fair to do so. As a matter of common parlance, we tend to see them as synonymous-meaning, the kind of meaning which animates a human life, seems to transcend nature. It implies that when one asks the void “what is my purpose,” there is some entity or power which could, in theory at least, answer back. Even if you are someone who’s spiritual beliefs are only vaguely held, you very likely don’t locate your source of meaning in what you see around you, but in something “higher”.
Where you derive a sense of meaning, or whether or not you actually have one, can be easily deduced. When children ask a ruthless sequence of “whys” to get to the bottom of questions like “why is the sky blue” or “why do I have to put my shirt on,” the responding adult (assuming they don’t respond with the typical “because that’s just how it is”) will inevitably start with pragmatism, move into science, then land in philosophy.
In the philosophical territory, they have a few choices.
They can take the supernaturalist answer: “God made it that way.” This one is great to get the kid to shut up, unless they ask why God made it that way, in which case you’re screwed, particularly if the brute fact you’re trying to brush away doesn’t seem like the kind of thing an infinitely wise creator would conjure out of thin air, like the fact that animals fart or common colds exist.
You can give the postmodernist answer: “it’s up to you.” There is no objective reality! Not much need to comment on this one, bad answer, your kid is gonna turn out weird now.
As for the naturalist answer, there are a few options which vie for supremacy: “there is no reason,” the nihilist answer, is of course pretty unsatisfying. “Mother nature made it that way” is just the god answer again, but gluten free this time. “It decided to be that way,” the animist answer, is getting warmer and very kid friendly, but still pretty crunchy and just doesn’t seem to be true. Living things make choices, and nonliving things don’t.
The last and in my opinion only answer, is best given as the famous quote from biologist D’Arcy Thompson-“everything is the way it is because it got that way,” a statement best classified as emergentism.
This sounds like dodging the question, but it really isn’t. So, why is the sky blue? Well, when reality as we know it popped into existence 14 billion years ago (that’s the technical term), the laws of physics were such that a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering would occur, the scattering of light from its interaction with particles in the atmosphere, such that the resulting color is blue. No god ever said “the sky shall be blue,” yet the potential for blue skies existed for as long as anything has existed. Light and particles react to one another in definite, distinct, predictable ways, producing certain outcomes which weren’t present in either constituent parts, outcomes which produce still further outcomes when they come into contact with, for instance, human perception.
This is just one example of interconnected phenomena which lead to emergent properties-things which were not present on one level of interaction, but appear at another. A lot of fermions and bosons are needed to make a chair, but how they interact matters (this is structure, or more precisely, form), and so does that which the chair interacts with-for a human, a chair is a thing for sitting; for a cat, a thing for rubbing against; and for a termite, something to eat. The sitting, rubbing, or eating are all outcomes of a system, the relation between one thing (which is in fact many things, unified at a certain level) and another. They are emergent properties.
But the fact that they are emergent properties does not lead one to doubt whether they exist-that would be no less absurd than to deny the existence of the chair. They are physically constituted, given shape, and themselves produce further emergent outcomes-because we sit on chairs, we make more chairs so we have more places to sit.
Now, because of the emergence of the phenomenon of sitting, can we say that it is right to sit? Well, maybe. Do you think it’s right to sit in the same chair for 30 hours straight, without any compelling physical or circumstantial reason to do so? Probably not. But is it right to sit if you’ve just broken your leg? Most would seem to agree that it is. Is it right to sit down for dinner? Well, if everybody else at the table is doing it, it would seem strange not to.
Ah, but here we run into the naturalistic fallacy-the idea that because something is, that means it should be. Well, maybe. This is obviously nonsense when offered as a tautology- “eating breakfast is good because you can consume food early in the day,” the equivalent of saying “breakfast=good=breakfast.” But there is another form of naturalistic statement- “eating breakfast is good because it provides you with energy, which you need in the beginning of the day.”
Now, is it metaphysically true that eating breakfast is good? Do people in Plato’s world of ideal forms eat breakfast? No, because there is no world of forms. There is no such class of “oughts” which are ratifiably true, beyond the minds of conscious beings. The only kind of oughts we can derive are those which are derived from an is-"I am hungry when I wake up, therefore, I ought to eat in the morning.”
But we can also notice that every one of these sorts of oughts will depend on an implied goal. These goals are not defined by divine law, but are rather a product of natural evolution. We do not enter the world as conscious beings at the beginning of the story, but rather somewhere along a long trajectory (about 14.5 billion years at the moment) of natural development which starts long before the creation of life. But still, earth seems almost tailor-made for the existence of life, which seems to have appeared very early in its 4.5 billion year history, though we still cannot definitively say how abiogenesis may have occurred. The natural development of life out of non-life stands as a philosophically potent reminder that we are not fundamentally different from non-living things, but are rather just systems of non-living elements organized to such a degree of complexity as to give rise to what we call life-systems which act, rather than merely being acted upon.
Far before any living organism could have possibly had what we call consciousness (which, for my purposes at least, requires the presence of a mind, something lots of organisms have gotten along without) it behaved in accord with some goal. To live, even unicellular organisms have to eat. In other words, living things behave, like their non-living constituents, in accord with physical laws-but unlike non-living things, they obey physics through action, and interestingly, can also attempt to disobey those rules. Thermodynamics forces them to seek energy, but they don’t have to-it is perfectly possible for them to starve. As a result, we get natural evolution-a process of organisms responding differently to the demands of their environment, and the environment gradually selecting out the most successful traits for a given set of circumstances. When those circumstances alter, even slightly, organisms are forced to adapt, and whether they succeed in doing so or not, change occurs.
But what is fascinating about life is that unlike machines, which are typically more dependable when they are as simple as possible, it thrives on complexity. Diverse organisms don’t merely adapt to their environment, they also alter it-plants (primarily phytoplankton, distantly followed by the earth’s forests) oxygenate the atmosphere, and through the remarkable biological technology of photosynthesis, present a digestible source of solar energy for other forms of life to draw upon. Plants, aided by fungi, also help make other nutrients more readily available. Dead leaves, fallen trees, and lateral roots bring nutrients up from deep roots to the surface, creating a thick mat of organic matter over time which becomes fixed by dense root networks, creating soils in which other plants (such as, say, wheat or corn) can grow, allowing less tenacious organisms to devote their energies to more elaborate and absurd displays, such as creating colorful flowers, decorative plumage, or reality television. Large ecosystems, while they can be chaotic on a minute level, are in many ways regular and orderly, with trees acting as water regulators which absorb and hold rainfall, and slowly release it back into the atmosphere, producing regular, moderate rain events instead of rare and unpredictable deluges. When disasters do occur, multiple cohorts of species exist to repair the damage and gradually return a landscape to a state of equillibrium, a process called ecological succession. The whole mess works, without any conscious orchestrator, in ways that are so subtle and ideal that many a biologist feels their science is perfectly compatible with religious faith, even when it has presented one of the most profound challenges to it.
Humans are not just observers of this process, but also participants in it. This dual role-objectively existing in and as nature while also having subjective awareness of it-has been recognized for some time, something Cicero recognized as the difference between “nature” and “second nature,” and which Edmund Husserl recognized as “the paradox of human subjectivity.” This sense of separateness from nature is the source of the Cartesian dualism I’ve discussed elsewhere-this sense that the entire world could be a fiction, but not you (and interestingly, not your thoughts).
When we talk about meaning, and about what one ought to do and why, we thus have an implacable tendency to think about what is, and what we think of it, as if the latter is not also categorized within the former. But in fact, what we think is itself an appearance in nature. Thus, when we discuss the naturalistic fallacy-the idea that something is not good because it is natural-we have to ask what we’re talking about when we say “good”. Because “good” does not exist appropos of nothing, but only in reference to some aspect of nature. In other words, there are not good things; but only good relationships between things.
So, once we accept that discussions of the supernatural are in fact discussions of nothing at all, what we are left with are things that can only be good in reference to nature. We are forced to define our conceptions of good or bad in terms of what appears good or bad within nature, recognizing nature as a developmental process. We cannot, as Hume says, derive an ought from an is. We instead get an ought from what an is is trying to achieve.
For Aristotle, the thing everything in nature tries to achieve is some good-for humans, this highest good is eudaimonia. For Murray Bookchin, filtering eudaimonia through the legacy of the Enlightenment, this highest good is freedom. From this, the dialectical naturalist viewpoint, good is predefined as what nature strives towards, not something above nature which must be derived by looking beyond it. We interpret natural phenomena, not by simply labeling whatever happens to occur in nature as good, but by what is rational, here defined as that which is in accord with what nature seems to strive toward. There have been attempts to describe what it is nature strives toward: social darwinism is a particularly dark and cynical attempt, social ecology a fascinating but perhaps incomplete one. It is in this sense-the fact that nature is not univocal, and does not tell us straightforwardly what is right and what is wrong-that we are in fact forced to decide upon our own meaning in life. But we should not be swayed by claims that this meaning isn’t real, or that it is rooted in nothing other than our desire to find it. Our universal desire for it is, in fact, a consequence of its existence.