Murray Bookchin
A Philosophical Naturalism
What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the
relationship of society to the natural world?
In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of
momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other
life-forms face. They are not abstract philosophical questions that should be
relegated to a remote, airy world of metaphysical speculation. Nor can we answer
them in an offhand way, with poetic metaphors or unthinking, visceral reactions.
The definitions and ethical standards with which we respond to them may
ultimately decide whether human society will creatively foster natural
evolution, or whether we will render the planet uninhabitable for all complex
life-forms, including ourselves.
At first glance, everybody "knows" what nature is. It is that which is all
around us--trees, animals, rocks, and the like. It is that which "humanity" is
destroying and coating with petroleum. But such prima facie definitions fall
apart when we examine them with some care. If nature is indeed what is all
around us, we may reasonably ask, then is a carefully manicured suburban lawn
not nature? Is the split-level house it surrounds not nature? Are its
furnishings not natural?
Today, this sort of question is likely to elicit a heated avowal that only
"wild," "primordial," or even nonhuman nature is authentically natural. Other
people, no less thoughtful, will reply that nature is basically matter, or the
materialized stuff of the universe in all its forms--what philosophers
sweepingly call Being. The fact is that wide philosophical differences have
existed for centuries in the West over the very definition of the word nature.
These differences remain unresolved to this day, even as nature is making
headlines in environmental issues that are of enormous importance for the future
of nearly all life-forms.
Defining nature becomes an even more complex task when we include the human
species as part of it. Is human society with its ensemble of technologies and
artifacts--not to speak of such ineffable features as its conflicting social
interests and institutions--any less part of nature than nonhuman animals? And
if human beings are part of nature, are they merely one life-form among many
others, or are they unique in ways that place major responsibilities on them
with respect to the rest of the world of life, responsibilities that no other
species shares or is even capable of sharing?
Whatever nature may mean, we must determine in what way humanity "fits"
into it. And we must confront the complex and challenging question of the
relationship of society--more specifically, the different social forms that
appeared in the past, that exist today, and that may appear in the future--to
nature. Unless we answer these questions with reasonable clarity--or at least
fully discuss them--we will lack any ethical direction in dealing with our
environmental problems. Unless we know what nature is and what humanity's and
society's place in it is, we will be left with vague intuitions and visceral
sentiments that neither cohere into clear views nor provide a guide for
effective action.
It is easy to try to escape answering these troubling questions by
impatiently rejecting them, responding with pure emotion, or simply denigrating
any effort to reason out a coherent reply--indeed, by attacking reason itself as
"meddlesome" (to use William Blake's term). Today, even sensitive people in
growing numbers feel betrayed by the centuries-long glorification of reason,
with its icy claims to efficiency, objectivity, and freedom from ethical
constraint--or the form of reason that has nourished particularly destructive
technologies like nucleonics and weaponry. This negative popular reaction is
understandable. But swerving away from a specific form of reason that is largely
instrumental and coldly analytical creates problems that are no less disturbing
than those questions from which we are seeking to escape.
In our aversion to an insensitive and unfeeling form of reason, we may
easily opt for a cloudy intuitionism and mysticism as an alternative. Unlike
instrumental and analytical reason, after all, a surrender to emotion and mythic
beliefs yields cooperative feelings of "interconnectedness" with the natural
world and perhaps even a caring attitude toward it. But precisely because
intuition and mystical beliefs are so cloudy and arbitrary--which is to say, so
un-reasoned--they may also "connect" us with things we really shouldn't be
connected with at all--namely, racism, sexism, and an abject subservience to
charismatic leaders.
Indeed, following this intuitional alternative could potentially render our
ecological outlook very dangerous. Vital as the idea of "interconnectedness" may
be to our views, it has historically often been the basis of myths and
supernatural beliefs that became means for social control and political
manipulation. The first half of the twentieth century is in great part the story
of brutal movements like National Socialism that fed on a popular
antirationalism and anti-intellectualism, and a personal sense of alienation,
among other things. This movement mobilized and homogenized millions of people
with an antisocial, perverted "ecologistic" ideology based on intuition, with an
"interconnectedness" of earth, folk, and "blood and soil" that was militaristic
and murderous rather than freely communitarian. Insulated from the challenge of
rational critique by its anti-intellectualism and mythic nationalism, the
National Socialist movement eventually turned much of Europe into a cemetery.
Yet ideologically, this fascist totalitarianism had gained sustenance from the
intuitional and mystical credo of the Romantic movement of the century
before--something no one could have foreseen at the time.
Feeling, sentiment, and a moral outlook we surely need if instrumental and
analytical reason are not to divest us of our passion for truth. But myths,
mind-numbing rituals, and charismatic personalities can also rob us of the
critical faculties that thought provides. Recently, a Green organization in
Canada flippantly proclaimed that it seeks "cooperation" as part of its "new
paradigm" rather than "confrontation," which it considers part of the rejected
"old paradigm." In a more radical era, confrontation was the stated purpose of
radical movements! The mythic and uncritical aspect of "interconnectedness" that
rejects confrontation seems to have reduced this Canadian Green organization to
the level of outright accommodation with the status quo. Here, the need not only
to confront the evils of our time but to uncompromisingly oppose them has
disappeared into a New Age quagmire of unthinking "good vibes." The "loving"
path of compromises along which such "good vibes" leads us can easily end in
sheer opportunism.
If our contemporary revolt against reason rests on the misguided belief
that the only alternative to our present reality is mysticism, it also rests on
the equally misguided belief that only one kind of reason exists. In reacting
against instrumental and analytical forms of reason, which are usually
identified with reason as such, we may well overlook other forms of reason that
are organic and yet retain critical qualities; that are developmental and yet
retain analytical insights; that are ethical and yet retain contact with
reality. The "value-free" rationalism that we normally identify with the
physical sciences and technology is in fact not the only form of reason that
Western philosophy has developed over the centuries--I refer specifically to the
great tradition of dialectical reason that originated in Greece some twenty-five
centuries ago and reached its high point, but by no means its completion, in the
logical works of Hegel.
What dialectical thinkers from Heraclitus onward have had in common, in
varying degrees, is a view of reality as developmental--of Being as an
ever-unfolding Becoming. Ever since Plato created a dualism between a
supranatural world of ideal forms and a transient world of imperfect sensible
copies, the perplexing question of identity amid change and change amid identity
has haunted Western philosophy. Instrumental and analytical forms of
reason--what I will here generically call conventional reason1--rest on a
fundamental principle, the famous "principle of identity," or A equals A, which
means that any given phenomenon can be only itself and cannot be other than what
it is, or what we immediately perceive it to be, at a given moment in time.
Without this principle, logical consistency in conventional reason would be
impossible.
Conventional reason is based on an analysis of phenomena as precisely
defined, and whose truth depends upon the internal consistency and their
practicality. It focuses on a thing or phenomenon as fixed, with clear-cut
boundaries that are immutable for analytical purposes. We know an entity, in
this widely accepted notion of reason, when we can analyze it into its
irreducible components and determine how they work as a functioning whole, so
that knowledge of the entity will have operational applicability. When the
boundaries that "define" a developing thing change--as, for instance, when sand
becomes soil--then conventional reason treats sand as sand and soil as soil,
much as if they were independent of each other. The zone of interest in this
kind ...
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