Tom Rockmore

The Dialectic of Nature

For a long time, “philosophy of nature” (Naturphilosophie) was a derogatory term in the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary.1 It applied to idealists like Schelling;2 whereas Marxist-Leninists were said to do science. By “philosophy of nature” we do not mean simply a philosophic account of nature, which every theoretical system has to contain in one form or another. Aristotelianism has a philosophy of nature (basically inherited by the neo-Thomists, as we will see in Chapter 7) but Aristotelianism is not merely a philosophy of nature. One could call the pre-Socratics, including the Eleatics, philosophers of nature in the strict sense. However, the paradigm of Western philosophy of nature is in the work of John Scotus Eriugena, Paracelsus and the German mystics like Boehme, some Renaissance thinkers, Spinoza, and Schelling. As such, it has been a constitutive part of what we might call “the other way of doing philosophy” and has interacted not only with the mainstream of Western thinking, but also with what we called in Chapter 1 the “underground religiosity” that never quite surfaced in the form of an official theology.

“Context” as a Philosophical Concept

While it is impossible to list all the categories operative in the pragmatic tradition, nonetheless the following seem to be the most important.1

The Scientific-Technological Revolution

When we call Marx’s own view of the social function of science and technology “humanist” we have in mind not only the contrast with the scientism of Engels, but also the more complex issue of Marx’s own understanding of science and technology as well as of the status of his work as scientific.

Logic and Knowledge

We have reviewed the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of a world governed by four types of causality. A complete account of anything (according to this theory) requires an explanation from the four different points of view. Our initial exposition of the neo-Thomist ethical theory of man, values, and society tried to embody this approach, as do our account of knowledge and of thought.

Nature and the Natural

Thus far, the general thrust of the present interpretation of American philosophy has been one of emphasis on the context, on the situation, from which a particular philosophy arises. It remains to define the metaphysical stance involved in the thought of James and Dewey, as well as the relationship of consciousness to reality. We will first delineate James’s notion of “radical empiricism” and “pure experience”, and subsequently Dewey’s portrayal of the relationship between “experience” and “nature”. While it is fair to term the outlooks “naturalistic” as opposed to a transcendentalist perspective, we shall see that the naturalism advocated is extremely rich and multi-dimensional.

Nature and Knowledge

The neo-Thomistic theory of man, value and society teaches that we know man’s social nature, made by God, to be patterned according to natural law to seek the common good. This theory has important epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions and implications, which were refined with the development of Scholastic precision and distinctions. The account is not philosophically innocent and one must try to see in more detail what is known, where we get knowledge, what shape it takes, what it is good for, and what we do to acquire knowledge.

Science and Progress

The major objections to the view so far presented would center around the charge that it is subjectivistic, commits the genetic fallacy, is, in fact, anthropomorphic, is guilty of the intentionalist fallacy, and perhaps of a romantic “nature nostalgia”. Against such charges from certainty-oriented philosophies like neo-Thomism, transcendental phenomenology, and some versions of Marxism, we would argue that explanations as such are partial, and the difference among philosophies is not that one of them has complete explanations and the others do not, but rather that one recognizes that explanations are partial and the others do not. This is but to reaffirm the importance of contextualism from another point of view.

The Phenomenological Movement

The aim here is to discuss, in a manner similar to that in which the other phases of contemporary philosophy are described above, the contemporary problems of modern phenomenology. But there is a peculiarity of the phenomenological movement which should be indicated at once, since it will become apparent in the treatment of phenomenology in this and subsequent chapters. Although other forms of contemporary thought can be discussed topically, within an analytic framework designed to reveal their systematic approach to any and all facets of reality, a more historical approach is necessary with respect to phenomenology.

An Ontological Phenomenology

Problems of nature, matter and motion are typical concerns of ontology and have been widely discussed on this plane in the contemporary philosophic tradition. Phenomenologists, however, with some notable exceptions, have had little to say about ontological issues. The reason is not that they are, in general, unaware of the problems posed by this philosophic domain. On the contrary, several phenomenologists, notably Heidegger, are deeply interested precisely in this topic, which is even central to their thought. But, as the domain of ontology is not wholly separable from other regions of philosophy, other factors — in particular the form of epistemology defended — strongly influence what can be said on the ontological plane. For Aristotle, of course, ontology or metaphysics was not only a permissible but a necessary area of study. But, other forms of epistemology would seem to prohibit any explicit claims about the nature of what is.

Making Logic Practical

In the American school, traditional logic was viewed as inadequate. Dewey, for example, calls for a “logic of discovery, not a logic of argumentation, proof and persuasion”.1 He agrees with Bacon that learning consists in the growth of knowledge, and as such cannot be accomplished by syllogistic demonstration of what is already known. Classic logic is inherently conservative, emphasizing and falling back on the authority and intellectual achievements of the past.