All Things Are Full of Gods, page 8
Now, I admit that the presupposition informing the older vision was that reality and our knowledge of it have one and the same shape—that the world out there already has a nature like that of something thought through, according to a specific intentionality, under the aspects of mental forms—and hence the, so to speak, repetition of the world in our perceptions and thoughts actually reflects its intrinsic nature. So yes: this web of “causes” is at once a system of predication and also a general ontology—a picture of the structure of existence itself, as well as of the structure of mind, and the structure of the interaction of the two. The world consists in an intricate reticulation of rational relations, and the mind in mirroring those relations really knows the world. Only then do the sciences conduct us more deeply into the mysteries of the realities we already know, by enriching our explanatory palette. But the sciences don’t render our primordial knowledge of the real illusory.
HEPHAISTOS: Don’t they? Alternatively, one could argue that all of this is precisely why the older scheme was an impediment to the development of early modern science: it rendered natural philosophers unable to distinguish between the world as a reality in itself and the world as a representation of our thoughts. The two had to be severed from one another before the real work of discovery could begin.
PSYCHE: Is that what happened, though? Is that the whole reason for which early modern science rejected what it took to be the Aristotelian view of things?
HEPHAISTOS: Naturally. It was in order to make room for unprejudiced empirical and theoretical investigation of the physical world. Final and formal causes, even if they’re real, can’t be examined directly, and they’re far too likely to be called upon to provide easy explanations where we have no evidence. So it was necessary to eschew them altogether, to approach nature as a collection of mechanisms that could be examined without any presuppositions regarding some mystically indwelling teleology or some invisible informing power from “above.” Scientists learned to start from the barest facts, not from the ends and purposes we imagine we see imprinted on nature, and to proceed by small, cumulative steps, experimentally, inductively. And the success of this philosophy is beyond contestation. The scrupulous refusal of all metaphysical conjectures about “higher” causes required scientists to exercise the most precise attentiveness possible to the facts, and to dedicate themselves to observation, experiment, and classification. And see what prodigies it has led to.
PSYCHE: I grant all this. But, then, did the new perspective really sever reality from representation, or did it merely offer a substitute representation—one that was useful in some ways and pernicious in others? What you’re saying, after all, is that the extraordinary fruitfulness of modern scientific method was achieved in large part by a severe narrowing of investigative focus. Far from rescuing the real from our commonsense representations of the world, as you suggest, it subordinated reality to another, entirely metaphorical representation, and by this artifice succeeded in isolating certain organic and physical functions from their normal contexts. It advanced by way of an elective abstinence from attempts to know reality as such and by a concentration on mathematical descriptions of purely physical events. It was achieved precisely by piously refraining from speculations regarding vast ranges of experience and knowledge. Very well. So the first principle of the new organon was a negative one: the exclusion of any consideration of formal and final causes, as well as of any distinct principle of “life,” in favor of an ideally inductive method purged of metaphysical assumptions, and of a conception of natural systems as mere machine processes, and of an understanding of all real causality as an exchange of energy through antecedent forces working upon material mass. Everything physical became, in a sense, reducible to the mechanics of local motion; in time, especially as the centuries wore on, even complex organic order came to be understood as the emergent result of physical forces moving through time from past to future as if through Newtonian space, producing consequences that were all mathematically calculable, with all discrete physical causes ultimately reducible to the most basic level of material existence.
Initially, of course, this program hadn’t yet been complicated by the problems we’re discussing. In the first pale dawn of modern method, most thinkers were content to draw brackets around physical nature, and to allow for the existence of realities—mind, soul, disembodied spirits, God—that they saw as essentially extrinsic to the purely mechanical order those realities animated, inhabited, or created. They didn’t treat matter as the universal principle of all existing things. But they did replace the classical concept of God as infinite being and rationality, in which all things exist, with the God of deism, the craftsman who had constructed the machine from without. And they replaced the classical concept of the soul—the rational life-principle informing and shaping and vivifying living things—with that Cartesian ghost haunting the dead matter of the machine of the body: a disembodied “thinking thing” magically animating a corpse. For a time, the new dualism flourished, content to segregate the physical from the mental and to grant each its own domain, but of course such ontological liberality proved unsustainable. Reason abhors a dualism. No scientist worth his or her salt can rest satisfied with some realm of forbidden mystery, either within nature or adjacent to it. For the truly inquiring scientific intellect, any ultimate ground of explanation must be one that unites all dimensions of being in a simpler, more conceptually parsimonious principle. Thus, inevitably, what began as method soon metastasized into a metaphysics, almost by inadvertence. For a truly scientific view of reality, it came to be believed, everything—even mind—must be reducible to one and the same mechanics of motion. Those methodological brackets that had been so helpfully drawn around the physical order now became the very shape of reality itself.
This created an irresoluble dilemma, though. It had been the very principles and characteristics of mind that had been excluded from the scientific picture of nature in order to make the new method possible. Form and finality are paradigms, ideal structures, purposes, expressions of intentionality; they are of their nature intrinsically mindlike relations. Hence they had to be banished from our picture of nature: reduced to subjective impressions, illicit projections. Hence, too, the need for that gray mathematical abstraction that Galileo identified as science’s proper realm of study, but that so many came to think of as reality in itself. At one time, the belief that there was a coincidence between the structure of mind and the structure of nature had provided the mediating principle between them: form. As we’ve already effectively said, it was assumed that the human intellect can truly know the external world for two related reasons: firstly, because the form inhabiting an object of knowledge and the form appearing in the mind are one and the same form, expressed in two different modes; and, secondly, because the object of knowledge and the mind itself both together belong to one and the same source of intelligibility and being underlying all things, so that the knowing and the known are, at their ground, always already one. According to the new model, however, what real communion could exist between mind and matter? Matter is supposedly nothing more than mass and force, and all material actions are supposedly nothing more than exchanges of energy accomplished by thoughtless movement, immediate contact, direct force, and direct resistance. The universe came to be seen as, in essence, mindless technology, a composite of intrinsically unrelated parts, in which unified subjectivity, intentional directedness, incommunicable privacy of perspective, the capacity for abstract concepts, and all the other mysterious powers of mind have no proper place. There’s no room in such an order for mind as it truly exists. A proper reduction of mind to matter, in this vision of things, could only be the mind’s elimination.
HEPHAISTOS: All to the good. No proper inductive method begins already assured of the results of its investigation. Neither can we explain a phenomenon just by attaching it to some purpose. You complain of tautologies; but what could be more vacuous than to say that the explanation of a tree is that it exists for the purpose of being a tree?
PSYCHE: Conversely, how do you interpret the processes that produce a tree if you’re not first aware that it’s a tree you’re investigating? A tree, apprehended as an organic hierarchy of parts and causes, with a specific ontogeny and phenotype, is the phenomenal reality whose manifest teleology instructs the scientist in what he or she is measuring. It’s not as if, absent that phenomenon, we could simply immerse ourselves in the welter of atomic—or even molecular or cellular—events and then inductively construct the object of our investigations. And, really, how trite of you, Phaesty. Anyone who begins with the assumption that nature is a purely mechanistic order has done precisely what you say the sciences should strive to avoid doing: start, that is, from an assurance of what the results of one’s investigations must look like.
I tend to think that early modern method misunderstood itself. Even just as a working fiction, the mechanical model was never of more than limited usefulness. Pure induction is a fantasy—a desirable one maybe, but unattainable at the last. An investigator of nature can’t reconstruct reality ab ovo, just arranging and rearranging catalogues of bare particulars until he or she somehow sifts out individual objects and begins to discern integrated systems. Even the most rigorously empirical science must begin the work of analysis, at even the most elementary of levels, by attempting to interpret each datum in light of some presumed end. Even evolutionary theory asks why one particular mechanism evolved rather than another, and can provide a theoretical answer only by reference to the final result of the evolutionary line under scrutiny. Even if form and purpose have been conceptually demoted in rank to posterior effects, produced by the unguided interactions of material forces and “selected” by purely material conditions, in practice the scientist must frequently proceed as if forms and ends were causes. Evolutionary biologists explain an evolutionary adaptation partly by “reverse engineering” it from whatever purposes it serves in the present, and by trying to imagine what other purposes its earlier forms might have served in the past. The best way of understanding an organism is often to treat it as an intentional system, with innate purposes, even if modern metaphysical dogmas oblige the researcher to turn around and proclaim that such purposes and guiding paradigms are only apparently real—useful fictions of method and nothing more.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, yes. As Kant pointed out, we’re destined by our natural faculties of perception and representation to perceive natural phenomena in teleological terms.
PSYCHE: But how does one then know that it’s only a perception? If the method yields sound results, maybe that’s because the method is in keeping with reality. Why presume the mechanical perspective is correct and the teleological perspective false even in cases where it’s the latter rather than the former that produces intelligible explanations?
HEPHAISTOS: Some presuppositions are just basic.
PSYCHE: And some seem basic because they’re just indurated dogmas, and by presuming those dogmas a scientist isn’t merely suspending judgment. Rather, he or she is determining in advance what he or she will choose to regard as real or as only apparent, no matter what he or she observes.
I would note too that, before “higher causes” like form and finality could be excised from the grammar of the sciences, they first had to be radically misconstrued. By the late sixteenth century, the residual Aristotelian terminology still found in the sciences had long since been evacuated of its original meaning. When, say, Francis Bacon took leave of final causality, it wasn’t really the final causality of distant previous epochs he was abandoning, but something already altered and compromised by mechanistic habits of thought. Form and finality had already come to be conceived of as physical forces or influences extrinsic to one another, and to the efficient causes they evoked, and to the material substrate to which they gave shape and substance. Efficiency too was already thought of not as a rationally guided movement toward an end, prompting certain potentials to become actual for that purpose, but chiefly as pure force and instrumentality, while prime matter was no longer understood essentially as pure potentiality, but rather as some sort of universal physical stuff possessing boundless plasticity. The elements of nature weren’t imagined, as they had been in the classical and mediaeval synthesis, as having an intrinsic disposition toward order or vital integrity; they were seen simply as inert ingredients upon which formal determinations were adventitiously impressed, under the external guidance of final causes that operated merely as factitious designs. And so, seen thus, form and finality soon came to seem not only superfluous suppositions, but little more than features of an inferior and obsolete mechanical model.
But, of course, one can’t really reject something one doesn’t understand. The old concept of an aitia or causa simply didn’t mean what moderns mean when they speak of a “cause.” As I’ve already suggested, it’s more correct to think of aitiai or causae, in the ancient or mediaeval sense, as “explanations,” “rationales,” “logical descriptions,” or (still better) “rational relations”—not a defective physics, but that grammar of predication I spoke of earlier, describing the inherent logical structure of anything that exists insofar as it exists, and reflecting a world in which things and events are at once discretely identifiable and yet also part of the larger dynamic continuum of the whole. It was a simple logical picture of a reality in which both stability and change can be recognized and described. And these relations were intrinsic, indiscerptibly integral, and distinct dimensions of a single causal logic, not separate forces arranged in only accidental alliance. A final cause was most properly an inherent natural end, not just an externally imposed design, even if sometimes design was required to produce certain objects; it was at once a thing’s intrinsic fullness and its participation in the totality of nature. As I say, it’s a shame that we use the word “cause” univocally here, given that an “aetiological” or “causal” relation in this ancient sense is less like a physical interaction or exchange of energy than it is like a mathematical equation, or like the syntax of a coherent sentence, or perhaps like the coordination between memory and expectation in our awareness of the present. Admittedly, as I’ve said, this is a picture of reality that comes from ages in which it was assumed that the structure of the world was analogous to the structure of rational thought. But, then again, wasn’t that an eminently sensible assumption, given that there appears to be a more than illusory or accidental reciprocal openness between mind and world, and given that the mind appears genuinely able to penetrate the physical order by way of purely noetic practices like mathematics and logic?
HEPHAISTOS: Eminently sensible assumptions can also be eminently false.
PSYCHE: True, but here the question is whether the sensible assumption is also the one that makes better sense of the data. If nature abounds in phenomena that the mechanistic paradigm can’t accommodate, like consciousness—which is to say phenomenality as such, the entire “appearing” of the world to any mind at all—why on earth or in the heavens or here in the Intermundia should anyone conclude that this paradigm captures the entirety of reality, or that the older mindlike paradigm of nature is an illegitimate supposition, or just some version of the pathetic fallacy imposing personal characteristics on impersonal forces? I repeat, even if the attenuated causal language of mechanism served a sound purpose in shaping the sciences, it did so not by expanding—but by severely contracting—the realm of its competencies. And that certainly leaves human thinkers no better off with regard to the questions we’re discussing here than their ancestors were. In fact, the modern position is by far the more perplexing. At least those more ancient theorists enjoyed a perspective in which the mind was seen not as some astounding and imponderable anomaly within nature that had to be forcibly reconciled with an austerely impoverished model of physical reality, but rather as the most perfect and concentrated expression of nature’s inmost principles. For modern theorists, the situation is very different. Inasmuch as induction fails to provide them with a clear physicalist narrative for intentionality or consciousness, all they can do is live by a blind unreasoning faith in mechanism and choose to believe that some future science will disclose laws sufficient to account for the physical emergence of these phenomena, despite how very contradictory the idea seems to be at present. Or else they must decide, like those philosophers who call themselves “mysterians,” simply to assume the physicalist picture of things while accepting that they’ll never understand exactly how mind fits into it.7 Modern “naturalists” are no less dogmatic than their ancestors; they merely have far fewer clear reasons for the dogmas they embrace. The older, pre-modern physical logic was coherent, even if it was putatively speculative; the newer, modern logic is incoherent, even though it’s allegedly empirical. When mechanistic method became a metaphysics, and the tinted filter through which it viewed nature was mistaken for an unveiling of nature’s true colorations, all explanations became tales of emergence, even in cases of realities—life, consciousness, language, and even existence itself—where such tales seemed difficult to distinguish from stories of magic.
HEPHAISTOS: It seems to me that we’re simply talking about different frames of reference. All right, the older causal logic was a predicative logic and the newer is a physical calculus. It remains the fact that it’s the latter that allows for the modern sciences.
PSYCHE: Indeed, but it also remains the fact, for just that reason, that the modern sciences, requiring the very restricted method they do, mustn’t be mistaken for a universal model of truth. In the older metaphysics, one kind of causality didn’t exclude another; all forms of causality were integrally complementary and interdependent. Well, why think otherwise, especially when there are phenomena that become more explicable in light of those various kinds of causality? Nothing in the modern sciences obliges us to think of form or finality as logically superfluous concepts or to believe in a physical nature that’s really thoroughly mechanical. Standard evolutionary theory tells us that the semblance of purpose in nature is the accidental result of ages of phylogenic attrition and selection; an older vision of things might tell us instead that the process of attrition and selection is the actualization of a certain purposiveness in the structure of things, a certain tendency toward the fullest realization and expression of potentialities inherent within nature and its laws. Logically, neither claim can be proved over against the other purely from the observable physical evidence, and in fact neither actually excludes the other; either might be a licit perspective on the whole of things as interpreted from one vantage or its opposite. The issue then becomes which perspective can accommodate all the phenomena better, including the various phenomena of mental agency.
