NATURE AS A POSTULATE

Advanced text for Webinar on Philosophy of Nature

Introduction

For the first part of my discussion, I would like to begin with Aristotle, one of the most influential pagans of the ancient world, who once said that humans are ‘adapted by nature to receive virtues.’  

Hundreds of centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, the  angelic doctor, expanded on the ethical axiom of Aristotle’s ethics and came up with a Christian theological principle, which says that ‘grace builds on nature.’  

Let’s look back into this formidable example of historical dialogue relevant in Thomas’ time as it is today. I’m referring to the dialogue’s common postulate of nature. Nature adapts our mind and body to the pursuit of excellence. This principle came from Aristotle. For Aquinas, nature provides humans with eudaemonic goods, through the bounties of God’s creation, in that we find in nature a model for self-cultivation. In all these examples, Nature reveals an ultimate purpose or a telos.

After Aquinas’ discussion with Aristotle, responsible for Christian ethics as we know it today, at the beginning of the 18th century, we learn of Kant’s dialogue with Copernicus and Hegel with Newton. 

If Aquinas converted Aristotle’s concept of nature into a matter onto which God pours over the universe’s many gifts, Kant transformed the Copernican model into rational faith. That is to say, trust that reason can administer its faculties to set the procurement of moral goods to their intended purposes.  

Here, one can argue that Kant answers to Aquinas, who answers to Aristotle. Aquinas fills the Aristotelian gap between nature and reason: how can nature adapt reason to virtues if reason doesn’t adapt to its limitations, that, for one thing, it cannot become fully aware of nature’s laws? 

For Aquinas, reason naturally ministers to faith if it is called reason at all. This means that reason adapts to its limits and welcomes divine grace. The trouble with this view is that you have to wait for a divine sign to grant or reject your appeal to know the truth. On a sidebar, recall how it gave Abraham the most excruciating clusterfuck of his entire career as a father and a man of faith. If not for Kierkegaard, we wouldn’t appreciate this old sadistic tale. Going back to divine signs, that gives the clue to Kant: the pursuit of truth is no longer dependent on theurgy, or appeal to God’s wisdom through prayers and rituals, but instead on the critical examination of the limits of reason. 

The correct limit of reason is God. With God, reason ceases to function.

That is how Kant responds to Aquinas: God has to become a practical reality for reason to return to itself as a functional cognition.  Because with God, reason ceases to function, the return of reason to itself would require a massive amount of time and discipline for invention, least to say, the capacity to fabricate. As Kant argues in Opus Postumum, ‘to make the world intelligible, one must [be willing to] manufacture it in oneself.’ 

Kant’s example, however, does not fare well with Hegel. Hegel criticized Kant and Newton as well for both systems presuppose God, either negatively or positively. For Kant, God is a negative concept, and the return of reason to itself must make complimentary use of the unknown. For Newton, since the entire universe requires an external agency as the initial cause of its motion, God is, therefore, positively presupposed. In short, science cannot explain the initial cause itself. 

We ought to emphasize that Hegel’s reference for his critique of Kant and Newton is Aristotle. The thing about Aristotle is that he did not believe in an external cause. 

The cause of motion, or phusis, is internal, not external to things. No externality cannot be explained that is already apparent – it means you only need to find the middle term as the cause of the conclusion. In Kant and Newton, the external force, which is matter, is not affected by the reactive energy that bodies produce when accelerated by something external to them. It remains constant, inert, and refractive to human measurement. Therefore, it leaves an opening for an extra-scientific intervention, which is faith for Kant, and the prophecies of Daniel for Newton. 

For Hegel, of course, God is dead. With Christ on the Cross, resurrection is out of the question. God has forsaken the world, and his return is a mere spectacle, a simmering form of human entertainment, not a positive sense of return. We are left with the idea of God’s abandonment that we can maximize to human advantage, even without unlimited support. Instead of appealing to God, it’s time to resort to human knowledge or human excellence typical of the ancient’s pursuit of eudemonia, which nature can sustain. 

Hence, we go back to Aristotle’s formula – humans are ‘adapted by nature to receive virtues.’

But, you may ask, what’s wrong with Hegel’s concept of nature? 

First of all, if we are to stretch further Hegel’s understanding of nature, it reiterates merely without admitting it the Copernican revolution started by Kant. But, in fairness to Hegel, no matter how Copernicus jolted the traditional cosmic outlook, the fact that he left the Earth blindly revolving around the Sun is no good news to science. The Earth remains a giant rotating rock with no intelligence of its own, pushed to eternal circulation around the Sun by a still unknown force. Newton thought it was gravity. 

Nonetheless, Newton remained neutral about the cause of gravity, which allowed him to ‘insert a transcendent .. postulate …’  In Hegelian terms, Newton feared venturing into the speculative. For Newton, the speculative is no longer science, but what is ironic is that by repressing the speculative, he fell short of the scientific demand for a natural explanation of the laws of the universe.  

We can see here the partial correctness of Hegel’s critique, but what Hegel missed out is that Newton might have feared going beyond inductive science because he already realized in practical terms how to live out the mystery of the cosmos that science couldn’t reach. In fact, he organized private seminars among close friends unlocking the secrets of the apocalypse. In short, the transcendent postulate is not for science to live out, but for the self to realize, which, if you notice, is Kantian in essence: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’ (Critique of Practical Reason).

Hegel, therefore, normalized the speculative so that you do not have to maintain this internal dualism. There’s no external source of the universe’s motion – in fact, ‘gravitation is the true … concept of [matter] … realized as idea.’ Therefore, it is through the self-demonstration of the Idea that Nature occurs, no longer external to us, but is internal to thought.  

Arguably, as some Hegelians defend, Hegel anticipated Einstein’s theory of relativity since with this new cosmic outlook, the observer’s location determines the universe’s mental shape. If so, then both Hegel and Einstein remained stuck in the Copernican imperative, which is anthropocentric for all intents and purposes.  Nature is still the product of the human point of view. Einstein would declare that his God is Spinozist, not Christian or theological, which means that God is nothing but Nature in substance and form. But the fact that Nature’s laws are still relative to human measurement makes Einstein’s theory the culminating paradigm of Kant’s Copernican imperative.  

But with quantum mechanics, the status of the universal observer called humanity is displaced out of the Copernican universe. Well, it’s not actually displaced, but the universality of humanity gives way to multiple human personalities, which means multiple points of view. You know the double-slit experiment: light has many personalities, which is called the wave-particle dualism, especially when observed in the microscopic world. In the quantum world,  in the observer’s absence, reality is in different states, different localities, each allowing for no sure prediction. This is called superposition in physics. It gets complicated when there is an observer – reality chooses a specific time and location to show itself. This signifies that every observer is entitled to his own facts. In short, the absence of universality became the cost of the Copernican revolution, which Kant didn’t anticipate. 

As Schrodinger’s thought experiment with a cat inside a box filled with radioactive elements has well demonstrated, there are infinite possibilities of life and death, and vice-versa. When the box is close, the cat is both alive and dead. One may estimate these possibilities through algorithms, but the endpoint is still uncertain, as Heisenberg would argue. Nature can calculate more infinitely than any computer or mental processor. But when an observer comes to the scene, Nature seems to behave according to the laws we put into it – the cat is either dead or alive. This is known as the collapse of the wave function. One may be right to conclude there is no objective physical reality. Arguably, there might only be non-physical causal consciousness. But whether you are an interactionist dualist or panpsychist, arguing for a more ubiquitous role for consciousness in the natural world, or, following one of David Chalmers’ descript, a constitutive micropsychist who argues for constituted consciousness at the microlevel, in this case, quantum mechanics, it may also be the case of Nature cheating on us all along so that we can make more mistakes.  

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Let’s be done with science for a while. 

Given that, let me proceed to the second portion of my presentation. I am referring to Schelling’s philosophy of nature. 

Nature philosophy

Here, I would like to address the question for our next discussion: Can nature be posited philosophically, not just scientifically, outside of the human point of view? Are we not violating any logical criterion if we start with the premise that Nature precedes understanding? 

In the history of philosophy, every time Nature is postulated as preceding human thought, it ends up in an onto-theological form that Heidegger, for instance, accused all modern philosophies since Leibniz. In short, it conceals a theological postulate under the guise of being philosophical. But the same applies to science in the inverse procedure: inductiveness leads to an infinite, as Kurt Gödel demonstrates, which, then again, leads back to the predicament of Newton.  

The famous halting problem over the Turing machine, for instance, does not solve the problem either. When can an infinite motion stop, assuming it is not unlimited in the theological sense, which does not require the halting problem? 

The assumption is that an infinite such as God cannot appear in thought if it’s not received by thought.  Because human thought drives the infinite, contingency, such as expressed in the guise of interruptive or aleatory cause, must be permitted in a thought experiment concerning an infinite going on indefinitely. 

Conversely, if the motion of the infinite runs at infinite velocity, it cannot be intuited. The second postulate is that since thought comes at an infinite, the infinite is intuited. Therefore, the infinite does not run at infinite velocity, which is the third postulate. The fourth postulate is that, as Schelling described, the infinite is part-whole infinite, which contains an initial diremption, or what he called original separation. 

Schelling also described it as the original duplicity of the infinite, which is Nature. The definition is addressed to Kant, and to the problem of dualism that modern philosophy, for Schelling, had been unable to recover from since Descartes. In Ideas for A Philosophy of Nature, Schelling declared: 

‘Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind invisible Nature. [In] the absolute identity of Mind in us and Nature outside us … the possibility of a Nature external to us must be resolved.’

In his later work, Schelling went back to this formulation: 

‘Just as there is a path from the logical to the empirical, there is also a path from the empirical to the logical that arrives at the innate and indwelling logic of nature.’ (Grounding of Positive Philosophy). 

The assumption here is that Nature is given, and the rest follows. 

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Incidentally, one may accuse Schelling here of the myth of the given that Wilfrid Sellars, one of the earliest founders of modern analytic philosophy, described.

The given serves as the unquestioned foundational argument concerning our conceptions of things and the world. Sellars criticized this line of thought. The given functioned as a positive epistemic status of knowledge, which he calls the Epistemic Independence Requirement or EIR, arrived without basis in inferential cognitive states, like introspection, perception, memory and beliefs or IPM. It turns out IPM is more reliable than presupposing a given without ‘knowledge of matter of fact.’ But the trick is, our inferential commitments and priorities are just as dependable as, say, thermometers.

Thermometers are reliable as they indicate individual physical states with utmost precision, but they cannot actually infer, semantically speaking. In the end, Sellars would advocate a non-inferential state, a positive epistemic condition of knowledge, arrived through inference, which means the capacity of knowledge to maintain a reflexive attitude towards things that no thermometer can do. Sellars calls this the logical space of reason autonomous from our inferential states but is itself a product of inferential connections throughout time, one that is attained by striving for knowledge to improve. Once a decision is made concerning these inferential states, no historical whim must be allowed to change it. This is the meaning of scientific decision for Sellars.

In the following passages, Sellars sounded almost as Marxist as anyone familiar with Theses on Feuerbach would notice, but as oblique, as it can be: 

‘Scientific terms have, as part of their logic a line of retreat as well as a plan of advance – a fact which makes meaningful the claim that in an important sense A and B are the same properties they were before… The motto of the age of science might be: natural philosophers have hitherto sought to understand meanings; the task is to change them.’ (Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities)

For Sellars, one has to change the old meaning of the relation of A and B, for instance, not on account of history, but rather, on logical grounds, that is, as Sellars argued, ‘as long as … this new inference ticket retains its character as a scientific decision.’

This leads me back to Schelling.  

Schelling would have earlier complimented Sellars’ notion of a scientific decision as a priori science, or unthinged empiricism (from Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling). As unthinged, empiricism is no longer dependent on things knowledge of which are attained through inference, but rather on a priori construction of things. It transcends, among others, the Kantian embargo against the speculative penetration of the thing-in-itself. As Kant admonished, the noumenon cannot be constructed. For Schelling, what Kant couldn’t accept is that the noumenon is the true objective source of knowledge rather than the a prioris of reason. The justification of the a prioris of reason would only lead to Hegel’s absolute idealism– the absolute in idealism is the negative perfection of the immanent, transcendence-denying logic of science. There is no objective totality other than the Idea, the full and mature conception of Kant’s categories of reason. In short, Kant’s critique of pure reason naturally ministers to the dynamics of history. To this end, there is a lot of room to Kantianize even Marxism through the Hegelian formula – everything is sublated into the Idea of history.

Hegel did not say there is no outside, but the outside has to be captured, contained by mental algorithms, machines of intelligence, and controlled fluxes of the human brain’s plasticity.

Incidentally, in this sense, Elon Musk, now the second richest man-person in the world, is the quintessential Hegelian, as he puts in his Twitter account, ‘turns out you can make anything fly, haha.’ He was referring to his infamous Falcon 9 space launch vehicle.

As Schelling would have thought about, which I hope to demonstrate in the last part of the discussions, Elon Musk is the true Hegelian of the present age.  Perhaps, he may be the last Hegelian. My premise here is that Elon Musk’s Hegelianism is an excellent example of how from a severely anthropocentric view of humanity his exo-planetary scheme, not to mention his Neuralink project, shows in its fullest form the most negative idea of extinction. In his time, Schelling described this excessive logic of negative reason as the economic-teleological principle that defined the poverty of the spirit of the 18th century. (No, it wasn’t Marx who said it).

Schelling’s Part-Whole Schema of Nature

I would like to continue here with Schelling proclaiming in his controversial essay On the World Soul that since the beginning, the world is already an ‘arrested stream of causes and effects.’ Schelling argued that it is “[only] when nature has not arrested this stream, does it fly forward (in a straight line).” In its most radical sense, the concept of arrested movement refers to extinction. We are already dead, which, in fact, allows us to enjoy life to the fullest. Incidentally, this would also resonate with Heideggerians: ‘We need no longer to guard against death, for death itself stands guard for us’(Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Later Heidegger).  I call the first-order logic of this extinction must not be disturbed, otherwise life ceases to be a plan of advance and a line of retreat, echoing Sellars, in short, the schema of freedom where human flourishing is possible.

Here is how it goes: Nature’s causality still proceeds, ‘flies forward in a straight line,’ but as “enclosed within certain limits,” within which it “flows back on itself.”  At least, for Schelling, this is how the universe ought to be explained, according to first causes, which starts with intelligence. Intelligence introduces a rupture in nature’s straight-line causality through its own principles of motion and space. In a sense, human causality bends the cosmic movement, forming a “universal curvature … in which the world itself persists.”  In a sense, human intelligence is the gravity whose origin Newton failed to locate.

I call this the arc of reality, which functions in two ways:

1)      The curvature means that knowledge cannot enclose its relation to reality by continuing on the curve to close in on a tight circle,

2)      The arc of reality is a guarantee that life will serve its purpose in a non-enclosed existence.

This means that life can only thrive as long as the curvature remains, otherwise nature will proceed to a pure straight-line causality without limit, therefore, at an infinite velocity. Conversely, this will mean extinction will proceed to an artificial course where nature itself has lost interest in real extinction, so to speak.

In today’s parlance, this is called the era of the Anthropocene where humanity has become the sole force of species-wide extinction, which is now starting with the acceleration of extinction among lower species, brought about by human invasive, capital-driven intervention, emitting dangerous carbon content and drastically altering biodiversity.

In his controversial trilogy, Ages of the World, Schelling proposes the following maxim: ‘What thinks in me is what is objective in the world.’ Let us sample this quotation against Elon Musk’s implicit concept of nature, with his ‘anything can be made to fly, haha.’ The Hegelian in this ‘haha,’ which even Schelling would agree is that the continuity of the space of reason with reality is not an impossible task that intelligence can undergo in pursuit of knowledge. ‘Anything can fly,’ haha, given the right algorithm of advance, but also a line of retreat, in the Sellarsian framework, if nature refuses to become objective in our idea. 

As part-whole, Nature is both within the concept and outside of it, where the outside is open to speculation. Elon Musk ignored that this space of reason is contiguous with reality only as an inflationary rearticulation of what is objective, which becomes active in the idea.  In short, nature is an inflated realism of the idea that makes the world intelligible. The problem with this formulation is that, typical of Hegel, thinking also becomes reducible to one side of the division, between mind and nature, as if they do not constitute a unity of thought, and as if nature does not think. That is precisely the point: nature must not be allowed to think, nature must not be allowed to philosophize, so that ‘anything can be made to fly, haha.’

But does nature really think? Recall that I began the preceding section with the question, can nature be postulated outside of the human perspective? Does nature really think without concepts? Let me answer this question with a negative proposition: Thinking is not without being that precedes it. It does not mean that being can be thought without thought itself. As Schelling would argue, “[not] where there is no mechanism, no organism, but rather conversely, where there is no organism, no mechanism.”  The mechanism refers to Nature. 

Contra Quentin Meillassoux, who disputes the subject-object correlation typical of post-Kantian epistemology, or the theory that an object cannot be thought without the subject, and vice-versa, forming a mutual dependent cyclical epistemic frame, an arche-fossil, such as a radioactive trace of the first two minutes of the Big Bang, or a dinosaur fossil, is, in fact, unthinkable without a time capsule that is the human brain. For Meillassoux, this is the ultimate limitation of knowledge, that it is always subject-dependent. But this limitation is the true power of knowing. The brain as a time capsule traces a cosmic evolutionary continuity, however, remote it may seem, with the deep unconscious past. Everything is connected in nature as a part-whole schema of everything there is. In this sense, the human brain is a time capsule, a small preview of the universe. But it requires intelligence to crack, just as little as a tiny glimpse of deep time. It requires a practical will, a plan of advance, a line of retreat through which deep time becomes active in thought. In this sense, nature also thinks as much as plans in advance, and retreats from systems features that are not amenable to its self-organization. Thus, nature also makes a scientific decision.

Now, with this formulation, can anything be made to fly, haha? 

One way to answer this question is to see if nature thinks of flying. Or, does nature think of Elon Musk as the next richest man on the planet? Does nature plan in advance how to colonize the red planet? Does nature think of how to repeat the history of Western colonization on Earth in Mars? Does nature think like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk’s rival in money-making, who argued that ‘space is the only way to go’ because resources are running out in this planet? Does nature think like a capital-driven Anthropocene that it is easy to imagine the world’s end than capitalism?

By its nature as part-whole schema, it is also logical to suppose that Nature can even think of dismantling capitalism, and human exploitation of various degrees and intensities, and, lastly, the end of Nature that doesn’t think. In short, and in conclusion, we really cannot imagine the end of capitalism if we continue to believe that nature doesn’t philosophize, which can only support a one-sided, and thus, unrealistic utopia, which is the technosingularity of capitalism.

In other words, and in conclusion, we need a sensible philosophy of nature to take apart the world governed by capital which has been around for just a tiny fraction of deep geological time.  Capitalism is not eternal, but Nature is.