Deconstructing Mill's Status of Nature

When I first saw the title to John Stuart Mill’s essay “The Amoral Status of Nature”, I became excited and figured that it would be a simple report on nature, as the very title suggests Nature as ‘having no moral restraints, standards, or principles’—neither moral or immoral.

Mill takes up the task set down by many previous thinkers and attempts to unpack what we should consider nature to be as humans and understand how we interact with it. He begins by expressing that the nature of any given thing is the aggregate of all of that thing’s powers and properties. He therefore claims that Nature is inherently the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. By definition, Nature is ‘the sum of all phenomena’, meaning it encompasses all that does, does not, and could happen; it is a collective name for all the facts of the world, both actual and possible.

Mill philosophizes that to better understand nature we must operationalize it and decide whether it A—is the sum of all powers, properties, and everything that happens as a result of them, or B—only what takes place outside of intentional human intervention. However, as he states earlier, Nature is the sum of all phenomena; does this mean, then, that human intervention should be classified as a distant, perhaps indirect result of nature or as an aberration of such? Mill explains that human action is not centered on what we do to get around nature but rather what law of nature do we use to contradict/surpass another?

Mill writes that man may obey nature but does not guide himself by it—that he may even act directly through nature but it is not always knowingly. Reflecting on Bacon’s piece “The Mastery of Nature”, Mill seems to disagree with his logic of man ‘obeying’ nature as a means of controlling it to his own idea of controlling nature. Mill writes that to ‘control’ one aspect of nature is merely obeying or succumbing to another, and therefore asks if that is not nature merely controlling us? Mill further claims that even if you do count human interaction as a part of nature, any action other than obeying our natural, basic instincts would be an act of meddling with nature. Therefore, if the artificial is no better than the natural, to what end are the arts of life?

Given Mill’s understanding of man’s actions as simply using one aspect of nature to over-power another, I think we could include our intentional actions as a legitimate part of nature, even though he would argue they are deviant acts. I ask then, however, how some actions we take such as tilling and fertilizing a field or mining wells count as such? If they are technically just indirect results of us using nature to overcome nature, they are neither good nor bad, simply natural actions. Finally I think that the way in which Mill writes about humans conquering nature seems to create a concept of nature as ‘the other’, which personifies it into an enemy. Essential to a better and more widespread understanding of nature is our initial acceptance of it as a body to work with, rather than against.

The "Key" to Locke

You can thank Professor Baldwin for the pun. In this excerpt from the Property chapter of his Two Treatises on Civil Government, Locke spends most of his time conjuring up a history of the use of nature as property for humans, quoting the Bible several times as a bastion of credibility. In the same vein as his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Locke has a somewhat suspicious view of nature in its unperturbed state. While Hobbes famously described human life in the “state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in The Leviathan, Locke sees nature as something that must be molded and shaped by humans in order for it to be of any use to them. Essentially, nature in its unaltered state has no intrinsic value to us.
The key, then, is to accomplish that molding and shaping with one’s own physical labor. By tilling the ground, planting seeds, and cultivating the crops (I may have left out a few steps), a man gives worth through his own labor to a piece of land that was previously worthless. Because of that labor, Locke asserts that that very piece of land is now the property of the man who gave it its worth. Under this system, everyone starts off on a level playing field. Nature in its totality (i.e., the Earth) has been given to mankind by God, so anyone can tromp out into the wilderness and lay claim to Nature by laboring it into submission. Although he doesn’t say it outright, Locke makes the implication that nature must not just be labored upon, but conquered and forced, much like a slave by his master, to perform a specific purpose which it would never be interested in performing on its own. The difference is that Locke has a problem with human slavery, but advocates the conquest of nature with biblical authority.
Therefore, since everyone started off on that level playing field, a man has a duty to use those natural resources as efficiently as possible, not out of any respect for nature, but out of respect for his fellow man. If he uses nature wastefully, he ought to be punished for “invad[ing] his neighbor’s share” of nature itself. While Locke acknowledges that the amount of natural resources on Earth are pretty much boundless and unable to be depleted (that is, in his time), he still advocates prudence in their exploitation. Locke, as a political theorist, is far more interested in nature’s functions as the property of mankind than any exercise in examining nature in itself. Nature is property, property is power, and power is precisely that with which political scientists are concerned. I think we can call that having nature on-Locke.

Abiogenesis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

Pretty interesting video I remembered seeing at some point; adds to our discussions on matter, form, telos, & Aristotle's points on chance vs. necessity in understanding why things are the way they are. Skip to around 4:00 if prone to bio headaches, let me know what yall think.

Ils ne pensent pas, donc...

Even in reading the title of the selection from Descartes, "Animals as Machines", I anticipate a certain hostile gut reaction as we begin to discuss Descartes' conception of the distinction between human and animal life. Given our inherent sense of the difference in kind between natural creatures and the artificial contraptions that normally go under the name of machine, this thesis naturally provokes objections, amplified no doubt by the affection most of us have felt for various animals (or even animals in general) at one time or another; we do not like to think of our pets as automatons. However, one should note the fairly comprehensive manner in which Descartes' addresses potential rebuttals to his argument, which make critique of this mechanistic view of animal life more fraught than it may seem at first.

In common with Aristotle, Descartes that human art is a sort of copy of nature; hence, to speak of animals as 'mere' machines is not equate a killer whale with a wind-up doll. Rather, artifacts of human design are phenomenally less complicated versions of the designs seen in the natural world (in the same manner as, Descartes might say, our powers of art pale compared to the creative intelligence of God, whose machines natural things are). They also posses the same sort of biological life humans do, yet do not preform any actions that cannot be explain in terms of passions; it is important to note here the sense of passion as something undergone, and hence not a matter of active agency. The faculty of language, Descartes notes, seems to set humanity apart categorically from all natural life. More broadly, while we might grant that animals possess a certain level of intelligence (varying of course from species to species), they do not seem to possess any reflective capacity, which is to rephrase Descartes' contention that they have no thoughts. Hence, to say that animals are machines is not to denigrate them but merely to day they are dependent on natural forces and not on reflective choices for their actions.

The most promising critique of Descartes' thesis seems to me to consist of a deflationary view of human consciousness rather than an exalted view of animal intelligence (that is, the opposite of what he argues his piece is about), but that is another story.

On Isaac Newton's Mechanistic Metaphysics

Newton begins by telling us that all particles have a force of inertia and from that force move. He then claims that some active Principles, like Gravity and Fermentation are not supernatural qualities of a being but are Laws of nature. These laws of nature he says are caused by the supernatural and differ from the Aristotelian sense of occult qualities that lie hid in the body, because these supernatural qualities are carried out and therefore not hidden. He says that in order for philosophy to move on someone must come up with general laws of motion that all corporeal things follow. Ironically, Newton does not answer this for us because it is just too lengthy for him, so he instead tries to answer what the cause of motion is.

He says it is not blind fate that creates this motion it is the act of higher being or God. Newton says that God is more able to move all the living beings he created than we are able to move our bodies. Despite this we are not part of God's body. all of his creatures including us are simply his little puppets that he likes to play with. Newton declares that we are completely subservient beings to God's will and God is able to create particles of any shape and density thus being able to create many different worlds in our universe that he can control.

Newton's explanation of the cause of why things are and why they move is not complicated at all or really new. Its pretty much the book of Genesis mixed in with the fact that we are completely subservient to God and don't think at all on our own.

Thinking & Doing... with Mr. Bacon

In "The Mastery of Nature," Francis Bacon deals with several issues regarding our approaches to having power over nature and understanding nature (which he calls Human Power and Human Knowledge). By power he means our ability to generate and superinduce new nature on a given body, or to physically transform concrete bodies. By knowledge he means our attempts to discover the form, or "nature-engendering nature," of bodies; that is, the Latent or underlying process(es) at work causing things to manifest in their actual material forms.
The term "nature-engendering nature" is rather interesting. I take this to mean the natural law or process that causes bodies to possess a specific nature in the first place. A specific nature leading to the generation of specific natures! This language of Bacon's rather resembles the cyclical notions present in Aristotle's Physics.

Bacon also references the four causes, namely: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final (or the end), and agrees that "true knowledge is knowledge by causes." He does not regard any of these as particularly useful, however, except form. The final, he says, corrupts all sciences except those dealing with human action (I presume because the idea of action toward an end leads inevitably to anthropomorphism). The efficient and material are only shallowly true when taken, as they almost always are, in isolation from latent processes leading to an object's form. He also cautions us to remember that form does not give existence. He believes that just such an error has lead to the tendency of philosophy to deal with the eternal law, by which all individually formed bodies abide, as a foundation for action as well as knowledge.

Bacon believes that a dichotomy between science and philosophy exists with good reason, and that one must inform the other. He indicates, however, that the roots from which our current science and thought have stemmed were ill-informed in the first place. He accuses modern humanity of attempting to act and think based on grand and ambitious abstractions before taking the time to understand local and practical aspects of reality.

It would be "safer" to begin and raise the sciences from the ground up, perhaps to devote our abilities to dissecting our own ecosystem before we try to understand the mechanics of nuclear fission. I must say that I agree with this position. A fundamental issue with humanity seems to be that our abilities have far, far, far exceeded our needs.

Bacon seems to find a great danger in our tendency to act upon nature that we do not understand. With regard to the "latent process" he mentions, Bacon places its manifestation outside the realm of our senses, rather than simply observable in step-by-step interactions of bodies, and pins it as dependent upon infinitely multitudinous and infinitely minute factors. He acknowledges the complexity of even the most seemingly simple processes and interchanges. The problem then is that we have rashly allowed our human power over nature, and the extent to which we utilize it, to surpass our human knowledge of the very actions we are performing, as well as their consequences. We believe that our understanding is very vast, but do not recognize the level of mystery still present on a local scale. The fact that environmental/ecological science is such a new field speaks volumes of this error. We have philosophized and theorized and formulated our way back in time, forward in time, into the tiniest sub-atomic particle, and out to the farthest reaches of the physical universe; yet, how well do we understand the actual impact that driving an actual car 100 miles has in our actual environment? Or using an actual pesticide? Or an actual oil spill?

Though he never explicitly states it as such, Bacon seems to be criticizing human ambition with regard to science. We fail to recognize the importance of understanding, in a practical way, the innumerable and subtle factors at play in a body, or system, before we set about changing it around.

To deal with these issues, Bacon suggests the allotting of speculation on forms, which are eternal and immutable, to philosophy, rather than the sciences (and to be called metaphysics), and these insights should inform our knowledge; and to the sciences, he allots the matters of specific, ordinary course (calling it physics), with these insights informing our power, or actions.

The significance of this division is as follows:
Rather than great laws that affect celestial bodies and other such non-direct matters, science should focus its attention on practical aspects of reality. Science informs what we are able to do, and should thus investigate our involvement with the real world around us, and should deal with matters of certainty, rather than of abstraction. This helps avoid the danger of advancing our ability beyond our capacity to grasp the implications of that ability. Science deals with real, active processes at work in individual bodies that take forms, but not the forms themselves.

Philosophy, being in a sense the science of knowing, informs what we understand of the essence of the world around us and our place in it. It deals with forms themselves, which are essential and unchanging.


...mm, so: I think that Bacon actually has some very wise and relevant points, buried beneath all this mumbo-jumbo rhetoric! (Why he doesn't say what he means in somewhat more plain language, I shall never understand...)

In essence, I believe Bacon's point to be that our abilities have exceeded our needs to the point of being dangerous. The piece's being titled "The Mastery of Nature" seems almost ironic, as he spends the greater part of it dumping on the way in which we've gone about understanding and acting on nature thus far. True mastery requires a reliable and practical comprehension of the world around us, and the power we have should never become detached from what we know. The two are necessarily interdependent, lest chaos ensue!

With this interpretation, I agree with a lot of what Bacon says. Whaddayall think?

Bacon, creating laws

In Book 1 Bacon introduces a new way of interpreting nature. He believes that "the only hope is true induction," rather than syllogism. There are two ways of discovering truth according to the proposed "induction." The first way (he says, the way we currently use) describes how we make sense of things according to the laws that we create. The other way (he says, the "true" way that has yet to be utilized) suggests that we first gather information from the senses and "particulars" before making the laws. Bacon insists that the first method is wrong because it suggests that we assume things are the way they are due to an artificial principle that man generates. What would be a more accurate interpretation of nature would be if we made sense of what we learn first, create law second.

But is this first method wrong? How are we to create laws if we don't first establish what we understand? Perhaps these aren't so different. What say ye?