American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

There are some intriguing and inviting complexities around the twin concepts of nature and naturalism. For too many evolutionary biologists, and even evolutionary psychologists, who should know better, Nature with a capital "N" is rarely analyzed and when done so it is with the crudest of instruments. And for those of us who do know better, we register with some vexation that the reigning concept of naturalism has been flattened into a dull-witted colorless perspective that veers toward some kind of materialism; a belief in the exhaustive correlation of chance and law, alas, with no help from Peirce; a tendency toward a mind/brain identity thesis; an emergentism vis-à-vis consciousness (and the corollary rejection of panpsychism); a one-dimensional instrumentalism about the purely pragmatic role of thought or reason, here, without Dewey's staunch preservation of value, norms, and even beauty; a rejection of so-called supernaturalism; and a methodological monism that shies away from first person or internal reportage in favor of an event and behavior driven model for adaptationism, and this without the more sophisticated notions of the "event" that have emerged in French thought.

Clearly, for we among the cognoscenti, this so-called naturalism has but little to do with the capacious understanding of the term that we have almost grown up with. From "our" perspective, the world of Dawson and Dennett is truncated, polemical, norm driven, and starkly removed from nature in its fuller sense. As a preliminary, and by way of contrast, I will lay out some of the commitments of a more philosophically inclusive understanding of naturalism and the nature it serves and honors.

1. 1. Nature is all that there is, i.e., there is no nonnatural realm.

2. 2. The concept of the supernatural actually denotes events and complexes within nature that have a vagrant, perplexing, or unnerving quality. For muscular materialists these events can easily be condemned to the "realm" of nonbeing, thus bringing inquiry and even query to an abrupt halt. But what is wrong with saying, for example, that ghosts are "in" nature, for where else would they be? Rather, the task is to ascertain in which respects a ghost prevails vis-à-vis more accepted complexes, and in which respects are some of its traits novel or hard to locate, either causally or from the standpoints of time and space, or even vis-à-vis consciousness and self-consciousness. To me it makes sense to ask if [End Page 124] a ghost has self-consciousness and is aware of the time process in, say, two ways as opposed to our one (roughly stated). I've been warned that this is "spooky naturalism" yet even the occasional frisson in the face of nature's indefinite complexity and explorability seems anything but giving license to supernaturalism.

3. 3. The very word nature has no referent. There is no such thing as the nature, but only natures.

4. 4. Nature is orders, not exhaustively constituted by orders, not "something" defined as orders, just orders. But there is no order-of-orders, no über order. For good or ill, there is a perennial aesthetic longing that is almost impossible to resist; namely, the hunger to round the circle, to have beauty on credit with no intention to pay, to have cosmos, logos, and infinite-self-referentiality, and, more dramatically, to elevate the good and the beautiful, perhaps one and the same, above being—and here we may think of Jean-Luc's Marion's move to outflank Heidegger by putting the question of being in the one-down position. Perhaps the worst aesthetic manhandling of nature is found in process panentheism, seemingly a gentile cousin whom it is alright to invite for English-style tea and crumpets. Alas, this cousin, who never seems to lack a dancing partner, has a shadow side that has been so cleverly hidden that it takes a supreme effort to see it. Among the many imperialistic doctrines, that is, inflated concepts that ride roughshod over the humbler miniworlds of ordinality, we see creativity; the extensive continuum, panpsychism; the above-noted infinite self-reference, obviously dear to the middle-Royce, a wonderful...