We are Natural Creatures in a Natural World

Naturalism without Mirrors is a complex book in which one of the most brilliant contemporary philosophers, Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, discusses a version of what it would be no exaggeration to call the dominant philosophy of our time: naturalism. It is a version that responds implicitly to many in-house anti-naturalistic positions.

Naturalism, writes Federico Laudisa in a recent volume of the same name, ‘has become a general framework of reference for many philosophical questions at the centre of debates during the last half century’.

Like all major tendencies of thought, naturalism does not have a precise definition, and can be conjugated in a variety of ways. It can perhaps be characterized as the philosophical outlook that believes all existing facts can be investigated by the natural sciences, and that as human beings we belong to nature: we are not distinct entities which are separate from it. You are not a naturalist if you assume there are transcendent realities that can only be known in a way that is not subject to scientific enquiry. You are not a naturalist if you believe in the existence of two realities: one nature that may be studied by science, and another that is impermeable to it.

Naturalism emerges in classical Greek thought, unfolding for instance in the work of Democritus, and is reborn, after a prolonged silence, in the Italian Renaissance, before being reinforced in the triumphs of modern science. It gathers strength in the nineteenth century, and today permeates a huge amount of world culture. Theses that are very markedly naturalistic were championed by Willard Quine, one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century. One of his best known and most extreme propositions in this regard relates to the ‘naturalization of epistemology’: the effort to redirect to the natural sciences even questions about the very nature of knowledge.

But there are certainly also intellectuals who maintain a distance from naturalism. In his book on naturalism, for instance, Federico Laudisa feels compelled to point out that he ‘does not share the enthusiasm for naturalism shown by my colleagues’. Laudisa scolds naturalism above all for not being able to account for the normative (and aesthetic) aspects of thought. More emphatically, Maurizio Ferraris distinguishes ‘natural’ realities such as mountains, trees and stars, from ‘social’ ones such as contracts, values and marriages, which are indeed realities but are socially constructed. Though coming from very different traditions of thought, both Laudisa and Ferraris see the limitation of naturalism arising where human thought begins.

This is precisely the problem that Huw Price takes as his point of departure. Price calls it the ‘problem of placement’, and formulates it as the question of where to ‘place’ in the world of natural sciences things such as moral values, beauty, consciousness, truth, numbers, hypothetical worlds, laws, and so on: all those things that seem least compatible, for instance, with the world described by physics.

Price’s answer is given in two parts. The first is the observation that our language and our thought are not necessarily representations of something external. This observation is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later writing: contrary to what is assumed by the most widespread theory of language (which can be traced to Gottlob Frege, the father of modern logic), our language does a great deal more than designate objects and properties of objects. If I look at the sunset and exclaim ‘How marvellous!’ to my partner, who is sitting next to me, I am not designating an entity, the marvellous that is out there, in the vicinity of the setting sun. I am expressing the effect of the sunset upon me; I am strengthening the closeness with my partner that comes from being there, enjoying it together, or I am attempting to show something of my inner life. Or perhaps any number of other messages, none of them having anything to do with an external object ‘marvellous’. If I say, ‘Come here!’, I am not designating anything. To interpret language as something that necessarily ‘refers’ to something external is to create false metaphysical problems. To interpret our sophisticated and complex linguistic activities as affirmations of an external reality is a basic error that, according to Price, generates the false problem of ‘placement’.

The second stage of Price’s answer involves a subtle slippage of the central idea of naturalism: to accentuate the fact that, as human beings, we are part of nature, and therefore can be studied by the natural sciences. Price calls this ‘naturalism of the subject’. The alternative is not between understanding moral values, beauty, knowledge, consciousness, the notion of truth, numbers, hypothetical worlds and so on as a metaphysical furnishing of the world, or instead declaring all of them ‘illusory’. There is another possibility: to understand them as aspects of our own behaviour as complex natural beings in a complex natural world.

This does not preclude the possibility of studying them in an autonomous way: a mathematician studies numbers, a philosopher of ethics studies moral values, and so on. Law, aesthetics, morality, logic, psychology … these are independent disciplines. But the presuppositions of these disciplines and the reality with which they are engaged do not contradict naturalism, because they can be reintegrated into and are compatible with the general coherence of the natural world, just as chemistry is compatible with physics: our thought and our inner lives are real phenomena generated by us, natural creatures in a natural world. Many of the liveliest fields of contemporary science are currently engaged in fleshing out this intuition: neuroscience, cognitive science, ethnology, anthropology, linguistics … A seemingly endless literature is growing, dedicated to understanding ourselves in natural terms. There is an enormous amount that we still don’t understand – because, as always, what we don’t know is vastly greater than what we know. But we are learning.

Perhaps in a curious way, transporting ourselves back to our natural reality, which for Price has its roots in pragmatism and in a respect for what we have learned about reality thanks to scientific rationalism, ends up bringing us closer to the intuitions of Nietzsche, which along a different route have led to the excesses of postmodernism: before being a rational animal, man is a vital animal – ‘It is our needs that interpret the world … Every instinct has its thirst for dominion.’ True, but our reason also emerges from this magma, and emerges as our most effective weapon.

Price’s book argues with strength and rigour for a humble and complete naturalism: we are natural creatures in a natural world, and these terms give us the best conceptual framework for understanding both ourselves and the world.

We are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit enough to know that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty and our ability to experience emotions. Outside of this there is nothing.

For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than 100 billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than 100 billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism.