Summary

The article argues that humans are not supernatural but anti-natural, distinguishing between the wildness of nature and the artificiality of human civilization.

Abstract

The author of the article posits that while everything can be considered natural from a scientific standpoint, there is a philosophical distinction to be made between the wild aspects of nature and the artificial constructs of human society. This dichotomy is rooted in the concept of nature's wildness versus the civility and artificiality that humans have cultivated. The article suggests that despite the naturalization of mental phenomena, which challenges Cartesian dualism, there remains a clear divide between the wildness of nature and the unnaturalness of human civilization. This unnaturalness is not supernatural but rather an active opposition to the wildness of nature, as humans have evolved to recondition and civilize their environment through the use of science and technology. The author concludes that this anti-natural stance is driven by an existential horror of nature's indifference and is embodied in the humanist ethos that values personal character and the ability to shape the world.

Opinions

The author believes that the term "natural" is semantically complex and can be applied in various, sometimes conflicting ways.
There is a suggested reconstruction of Descartes' substance dualism, emphasizing the distinction between the wildness of nature and the artificiality of human constructs.
The article argues that the metaphysical divide between mind and matter has been largely bridged by psychological and social sciences, which have naturalized mental phenomena.
It is proposed that the important distinction is not between mind and matter, but between wildness and civility, with humans representing the latter through their personhood and artificial extensions.
The author asserts that humans are not supernatural but anti-natural, actively seeking to civilize the wild aspects of nature.
The article implies that the pursuit of science and technology is an expression of humanism, which values self-consciousness, intelligence, and autonomy as anomalous in the natural world.
The author suggests that the humanistic dualism is unconsciously accepted in the trust of scientific methods, which are a product of human nature and civilized personhood.
The article concludes with the notion that humans are unnatural in their ability to objectify and naturalize patterns, allowing them to tame and humanize the wilderness.

People are Anti-Natural, not Supernatural

Descartes’ last laugh in the divide between wild things and artifacts

Assuming miracles are impossible, can anything be unnatural?

From a scientific perspective it may seem as though everything’s necessarily natural. Metaphysically, we should be naturalists in that we should be optimistic about the ability of scientific methods to uncover a physical basis of everything that exists.

But this is only a semantic question of picking one from among the thirty or so meanings of “natural.” In some sense something can be natural, while in another the thing can be unnatural. And as I’ve argued elsewhere, an important sense of “natural” is that of nature’s wildness, which conflicts with the civility and artificiality we civilized folks hold so dear.

On one side of what are often literally walls, there are, for instance, wild animals which live in the wilderness. On the other side, there’s civilized society, which is an artificial, intelligently designed refuge from the wilderness.

Here, then, are the makings of a reconstruction of Rene Descartes’ infamous substance dualism. Descartes said there are fundamentally two kinds of things: mind (thinking things) and matter (extended bodies). Thus, for Descartes, animals that lack the ability to think are as good as being programmed machines.

It turned out, though, that psychological and social sciences have arisen and largely naturalized mental phenomena, which casts doubt on such a substantive divide between mind and matter. Whatever scientists can explain, they explain by naturalizing the unknown. If mind is as natural, or as scientifically explainable, as material things, there’s no reason to think of them as having different metaphysical “substances.”

Does it follow, then, that we should treat minds as we treat anything else in nature? If there’s no metaphysical difference between minds and material things, should we scruple over whether to throw a person into a fire, when we would have no reservations about doing so with a pebble?

I think not, so clearly this metaphysical level of discourse doesn’t capture all the important distinctions. What metaphysics and philosophical naturalism miss is the difference between wildness and civility. Everything is wild that’s outside the domain of personhood, meaning everything that’s within nature in so far as nature is best explained with scientific models and exploited with technological applications. This means that nature is godless, amoral, impersonal, indiscriminate, awesome, and monstrous in its nihilistic (or at best aesthetically meritorious) cosmic evolutions.

By contrast, whatever’s been personalized, namely people themselves and our artificial extensions, as in our languages, worldviews, cultures, societies, and technologies are cultivated, domesticated, deliberately chosen, and thus unnatural in the strict sense of being not wild.

This doesn’t mean that personhood or a human society is supernatural or miraculous. A miracle would violate the fundamental natural order by being an event that lacks a grounding in physical causality. Far from being miraculous, we know from science how our species evolved from wild animals. We know, too, that there’s continuity between some animals and people since certain animals have mental properties and are even tool-users. There are, then, degrees of personhood, so this isn’t a question of having or lacking a Cartesian “substance,” a substance with which only our species has been divinely gifted.

In any case, if people aren’t super-natural, how should our unnaturalness be characterized? The answer seems clear: we’re anti-natural in that as civilizers we’ve taken up the venture of reconditioning everything that’s wild.

Underlying that ambition, I suspect, is an existential horror for the implications of nature’s pure wildness. We evolved to socialize in small tribes of fellow human minds, so the prospect that the natural order isn’t governed by any fellow cadre of lofty minds strikes us as absurd, as in deeply counterintuitive. But that alienation of our kind is just what scientific objectification entails.

What is to be anti-natural? It’s not that we occupy a higher metaphysical plane than anything else in the universe, even if that’s how it may seem sometimes as we contemplate things in abstraction, in our imagination. A supernatural power would reside outside of space and time, whereas consciousness only seems immaterial because of the brain’s isolation and its filtered access to stimuli. As best as we can tell, the brain is the mind’s substrate, and however complicated its inner workings may be, the brain is a natural, physical, scientifically explainable object.

No, to be anti-natural is to adhere at least implicitly to the ethos of humanism. The humanist is proud of his or her personal character, a character that seems anomalous in nature since self-consciousness, intelligence, autonomy, imagination, sociality, and ambition make a person behaviourally godlike compared to animals and clueless inanimate things. If they’re not exactly robots in Descartes’ prejudicial sense, animals are still close to being slaves to their genetic and social programs, whereas a person can figure out the truth independently by reflecting on elaborate mental models of possibilities.

That Promethean pride, which Christendom demonized for a millennium until it lost control of Europe in the rise of absolute modernity drives humanists to demonize the wilderness instead, by emphasizing the contrast between wildness and civility.

A supernatural agent would have power over nature in virtue of having some metaphysical grounding that engulfs nature or that somehow trivializes physics. By comparison, an anti-natural agent pursues the goal of altering nature, by casting most of the universe as wild in a pejorative sense and has some metaphysically natural ability to succeed at least partially in that enterprise.

The natural evolution of personhood and the social discovery of science and technology enable our species to act as civilizers of all things wild. Regardless of our second thoughts or our politically correct rhetoric to the contrary, this is the humanist upshot of civilized progress. This is the unconscious direction of history, which makes our species behaviourally anomalous, if not ontologically inexplicable.

Notice that the metaphysical naturalist assumes this humanistic dualism since naturalism makes sense only in methodological terms: the limits of nature are set by what scientific methods can explain. And trust in those methods amounts to trust in human nature, in the strengths of civilized personhood which enable us to understand patterns by objectifying and naturalizing them.

To insist, then, that despite our vanity, our species is fully natural like everything else is to presuppose the crucial sense in which we’re unnatural: we’re culturally anti-natural enough to have stumbled on the power of science which models and predicts the results of natural systems as a prelude to helping our societies tame and humanize them as so many grim reminders of the outer wilderness or wasteland.

I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing in that way. The newest one is Aristocrats in the Wild, and its 538 pages are filled with 89 recent articles of mine on religion and philosophy.