Way back last December, I wrote a piece entitled Dialectical Naturalism: Its Utility and Its Shortcomings, based on my reading of Murray Bookchin’s epistemological theory outlined in A Philosophical Naturalism.
That essay was marred by my own amateurishness, but also by the paucity of information on dialectical naturalism as its own particular branch of philosophy, a distinction which I think it deserves, but has not yet earned.
There are rumblings of philosophical digestion, however. It turned out that my essay was written a few months too early, as probably the best philosophical genaeology of dialectical naturalism (which we’ll be calling DN from this point forward) was explicated by Brian Morris in the excellent Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism, published this year by Black Rose Books. That book has motivated me to take a stab at articulating more clearly and concisely just what it is we’re talking about here. Hopefully this essay accomplishes the former-it certainly doesn’t achieve the latter.
Morris brings together many threads of naturalist thought-that of Mario Bunge (who receives particular attention), Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Roy Wood Sellars, Lewis Mumford, Charles Darwin, Bookchin and others. Like a mixer putting together musicians who have no idea they’re playing together, the end product of Morris’s work may not be perfectly unified, but everyone is at least playing in the same key. It seems like we ought to have a name for whatever key that is.
But even in Morris’ text, the tight, concrete definition one might seek for DN doesn’t appear in the way one might find definitions for other epistemological theories such as relativism, empiricism, and the like. Certainly, DN is a kind of materialism or physicalism, but it entails enormous downstream differences from what those philosophies are generally thought to imply. In the realm of ethics, materialism is at best utilitarian and quite often purely nihilistic. DN on the other hand commits one to the idea that things are both being and becoming, and therefore can be said to have clear goals and functions-ethically, this lands the dialectical naturalist in some form of virtue ethics, although the virtues themselves are necessarily fuzzy and up for interpretation. This, by itself, doesn’t make the theory wrong, but it does indicate that it’s incomplete-the fuzziness comes in because, while we are quite capable of making analytic or “reductive” predictions using the scientific method, certain questions can not be answered in this way-dialectical questions require dialectical answers, and a means for producing such answers remains to be seen, and indeed such questions are often regarded to be unanswerable. Dialectical materialism purported to be such a method, but we need only look at the course of the 20th century to see that Marx had incorrectly predicted the supposed crisis of capitalism which was supposed to usher in communism. The nature of historical development is far more complex, and it’s highly questionable that anything like “historical laws” can be formulated in the way Marx and Hegel imagined.
As an example: try to make predictions about your future child. If you have blue eyes and blonde hair, and your significant other does as well, science can tell you that your child will have blue eyes and blonde hair. This is purely a matter of genes, and is therefore an analytic question: we need only look at what parts your child will necessarily be made of to make a statement about the whole.
Let’s try to predict another question: what language will your child speak? This is a question best answered through dialectical analysis. If you and your spouse speak English, the child will almost certainly speak English, but we could never know this by dividing the child up into (theoretical) parts. Instead, we would have to consider the child (an organism with a language-learning capacity) and its environment (one in which English is spoken). If the child grows up in a German speaking household, the child will speak German. If the child grows up in a German speaking household in Maryland, the child will speak both German and English. And so on and so forth-we are no longer analyzing parts of the child, but rather the whole child in relation to its environment. This is a dialectical relationship-a child and a German speaking household in Maryland exist, but the interaction between the two necessarily leads to the creation of a child which is fluent in both German and English, an outcome only possible due to the characteristics of both starting elements.
In this sense, dialectical reason is utterly mundane and eminently practical-it’s nothing more than the ability to make a reasonable prediction about what will occur when two or more things interact-what happens when dough goes in the oven, what happens when milk sits in a warm room, what happens when you don’t hit the brakes at a stop sign.
In each of these examples, it is the interaction of elements in ways which find harmony in the functions of each which inescapably suggest themselves. In the stop sign example, there appear to be three major elements:
The stop sign
The driver
The brakes
We could add many other elements-the road, the child crying in the back seat, the car’s engine and transmission propelling it forward, etc. But we don’t have all day here, so let’s stick to these three fundamental elements. We can analyze the problem temporally in this way:
A driver is coming down the road. Seeing the stop sign, their foot instinctively depresses the brake pedal, engaging the car’s brake pads, which squeeze the wheel rotors until the car comes to a stop.
Let’s now analyze the functions or goals of the elements in question:
The stop sign-to alert drivers that they are legally required to stop their car, because failing to do so would highly increase the likelihood of a collision.
The driver-to drive to their destination in a way that adheres to traffic laws
Brakes-to stop the car when the driver finds it appropriate to do so
We can then compare these functions to their outcomes. In an ideal scenario, everything works properly-the stop sign alerts the driver to the need to stop, they act on this information by pushing the brake pedal, and the brakes stop the car. There is a harmony and communication between all elements in accord with their functions. But if you disrupt any of the functions-if the stop sign isn’t visible because of a truck parked in front of it; if the driver is drunk, asleep, or negligent; or if a brake line has failed-the result is an outcome which nullifies the functions of any of the other two elements. Their effectiveness is defined by their interaction, and, likewise, the function of each is actually formed by this coherent interaction of elements. People needed to get places, so they invented cars, and needing those cars to stop, they invented brakes. Brakes alone didn’t stop people from hitting each other and generally not managing traffic very efficiently, so stop signs were invented, thereby making it necessary for every driver to learn to recognize and appropriately respond to the shape, color, and language of a stop sign. In the same way, prior to cars, nobody needed to learn how to use brakes-one learned horsemanship instead. Cars are a product of human ingenuity, but their existence has altered how one develops as an adult.
The problem, of course, is that we quickly find that dialectical analysis has to take account of the fact that the world is composed of systems, indeed of systems of systems, and this lends itself to enormous complexity. Take our bilingual child. How do we answer a question like “what job will she have when she grows up?” The stakes have been upped dramatically. We can attempt to answer this question statistically-taking into account her household’s income, her IQ, her ability to speak multiple languages, the occupations and educational attainment of her parents, the likely job distribution in the overall economy by the time she’s old enough to enter the workforce-but really, the ability to make predictions on this basis is limited. It works for groups, but population analysis and analysis of individuals is quite different. For the individual, there are countless probable factors which may lead them to one career rather than others, and predicting which ones will be decisive is seemingly impossible. The question is dialectical, certainly-this is quite definitively a question of the relations between a whole and other wholes, one individual to everything they encounter in the environment-but it’s not apparent that it’s in any way answerable. And another factor about dialectical analysis further complicates matters-not only does an individual interact with many other things, changing in the process, the individual also changes the things around them, and this changes how these things will change them.
Take another example. Say this kid makes a friend at school. At first, they get along great, and this friend shows them how to play tennis. The kids start playing tennis all the time, and even the girl’s friend, who initially had only a passing interest in the sport, is becoming much more involved in it because she has so much fun playing it with her friend. But over time, the girl finds she’s better at tennis than her friend, and progresses quite quickly. The friend notices this, and starts to grow jealous, having enjoyed showing the girl how to play the game and growing accustomed to the sense of being a mentor to her. The two have a big fight and a falling out, and this provokes the girl to pursue tennis single-mindedly, begrudging the way her friend put her skill at the game above their friendship. The girl continues to play, and becomes so good that she ends up becoming a professional, Olympic-level tennis player.
Nothing about this story was predictable, from a sociobiological perspective-there’s no tennis gene (so far as I’m aware), nor is there any way of predicting that she would have become friends with another girl who got her interested in tennis, instead of field hockey, or soccer, nor any way of predicting she would have been so motivated by a particular incident that she decided to make tennis her life’s work. We could possibly find some genetic basis for the friend’s jealousy, and the girl’s reaction to it, but the actual degree to which these things can be found at the level of genes is uncertain. Both the girls are influenced by the environment beyond the two of them, but also by each other, and the ways in which they change each other influence the ways they will be changed in turn. It’s not inconceivable that this could have been predicted-but it’s inconceivable that it could have been predicted in any reliable way, or in a way which would have been useful when we seeked to answer the question “what will she do for a living when she grows up?”
And yet, the only precisely correct way to view this series of events is both systemic and dialectical-systemic in that every outcome is the result of interactions between many relata, forming a vast causal network, but also dialectical in that these relations are characterized by development through time, with each relata changing internally at the individual level of organization, changing its peers, being changed in turn, and giving rise to new, emergent properties in the system which produce further changes, and so on. Could this be interpreted and extrapolated? In theory, perhaps. This would seem to be at the very least an important part of the architecture of reality, however limited our ability to grasp it.
Finding DN in Ecology
In some sense, this must be recognized as the core utility offered by “reductive” Cartesian science-however much it misses, what it studies is, importantly, readily study-able, in that it studies wholes by dividing them into parts, instead of trying to study parts and wholes on different levels, and in all their vast and ever-moving relations.
And yet, the dialectical nature of relationships between elements in a system is highly relevant, as in the example given by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins in The Dialectical Biologist, in their essay on the field of ecology:
In ecology reductionism takes the form of regarding each species as a separate element existing in an environment that consists of the physical world and of other species. This interacion of a species and its environment is unidirectional: the species experiences, reacts to, and evolves in response to its environment. The reciprocal phenomenon, the reaction and evolution of the environment in response to the species, is put aside. While it is obvious that predator and prey play the roles of both “organism” and “environment,” it is often forgotten that the seedling is the “environment” of the soil, in that the soil undergoes great and lasting evolutionary changes as a direct consequence of the plants growing in it, and these changes in turn feed back on the organisms’ conditions of existence.
By the way, we’re talking science, and I’m not a scientist, so this section is going to involve a lot of quotes, and it will get annoying.
Alongside the problem of unidirectional analysis, Lewontin and Levins also identify a problem in the opposite extreme, that of the “Clementsian superorganism”-a trend which dominated ecology in the early and mid-twentieth century, originating in the work of ecologist Frederic Clements, whose legacy is discussed in some depth in a fascinating blog post by paleoecologist James Hill for the University of Reading’s Tropical Paleoecology Research Group. The gist of the post is as follows:
Under the Clementsian model, the community will always tend towards increasing complexity, beginning with relatively few pioneering plants and animals colonising unoccupied habitat. Succession continues until the community reaches equilibrium conditions where mortality and recruitment are matched, meaning the system is stable and self-perpetuating. Essentially, if an ecosystem is disturbed, it will always try to return to its original, climatically determined balanced state, an equilibrium state called the “climax community”.
The great universal law of equilibrium states that all systems tend towards a balance. Clements explicitly analogized the successional development of ecological communities with the growth of individual organisms, where it would be born, mature and even die. The ecosystem was actively progressing towards a stable system where species demonstrated a self-organising capability. The close integration of different species exercised some control over the non-living and living world, to stabilise their existence – Clements called the ecosystem a living, coherent thing, a “superorganism”.
Clements described ecological succession as the growth stages of an organism, in such stark terms that he actually refers to ecosystems as organisms. Here is a passage from his seminal 1916 study Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation:
Levins and Lewontin explain the Clementsian model as follows:
The Clementsian superorganism paradigm is indeed idealistic. Its community is the expression of some general organizing principle, some balance or harmony of nature. The behavior of the parts is wholly subordinated to this abstract principle, which causes the community to develop toward the maximization of efficiency, productivity, stability, or some other civic virtue. Therefore, a major priority would be to find out what a community does maximize.
As Hill explains, the model of succession toward equilibrium was challenged by the “individualistic model” offered by ecologist Henry A. Gleason. Gleason sought to explain why the observable behavior of plants clearly didn’t match the description offered by Clements. Rather than a strictly organized distribution of plants in an ecosystem, as predictable as finding a person’s heart in their upper chest and their eyes in their head, one finds plants opportunistically popping up wherever they can-behaving, in essence, as individuals. “Are we not justified,” he wrote in his 1926 paper The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association, “in coming to the general conclusion, far removed from the prevailing opinion, that an association is not an organism, scarcely even a vegetational unit, but merely a coincidence?”
But Gleason never rejected the existence of a process of ecological succession per se-rather, he denied that the process of succession could be convincingly predicted, being subject to countless influences which varied minutely from one context to another, with each circumstance going virtually unreplicated without human intervention.
The sole conclusion we can draw from all the foregoing considerations is that the vegetation of an area is merely the resultant of two factors, the fluctuating and fortuitous immigration of plants and an equally fluctuating and variable environment. As a result, there is no inherent reason why any two areas of the earth’s surface should bear precisely the same vegetation, nor any reason for adhering to our old ideas of the definiteness and distinctness of plant associations. As a matter of fact, no two areas of the earth’s surface do bear precisely the same vegetation, except as a matter of chance, and that chance may be broken in another year by the continuance of the same variable migration and fluctuating environment which produced it.
Gleason’s view was of plant communities which were constantly subject to change through the opportunistic migration of plants and changing conditions in the broader environment, such that what resulted were not static “guilds” of plants which bore any particular relationship to one another (except in cases where migration was especially rare), and certainly were not coalescing to embody some ideal principle. “The behavior of the plant,” he wrote, “offers in itself no reason at all for the segregation of definite communities.”
Lewontin and Levins agree, but nonetheless regard the community as an essential concept, not as a specific group of plants whose interactions could be deterministically outlined, but as a dialectical whole:
The claim that the ecological community is a meaningful whole rests on its having distinct dynamics-the local demographic interactions of species against a background of biogeographic and population genetic parameters.
The community then is not prescribed, but constituted by the interactions between its individual parts, and the ways in which those interactions serve to alter the individual species. The biogeographic region supplies the various species which are present in the community, and the individuals supply the properties that interact such as to create community-level properties-Lewontin and Levins identify such properties as “diversity, equability, biomass, primary production, invasibility, and the patterning of food webs.”
A Long, Tortured, and Provisional Definition of DN
Okay, that should be enough quotes to do away with most of my readers. If you’re still here, you’re likely wondering how all this is relevant to DN. What does it actually mean?
For me, DN is a framework of the following axioms:
Dialectical thought-recognition of the ever present quality of developmental change through time in all things and at all times, resulting from tensions within a given state of organization between things in a given system and at every level of organization within systems.
Naturalism-existing reality is the only show in town-if there is some other, spiritual realm, we can’t find it, and we can’t find any way it exercises any influence upon nature. Nature appears self-sufficient to explain itself.
Ontological realism-a belief that the nature we experience through our perception and the nature that “actually” exists external to observation are commensurable with each other-our sense perceptions, while they may incompletely reflect reality, do indicate meaningful truths about it. While we know that apples are not actually red and skies are not actually blue, the fact that we consistently perceive them as such suggests that whatever they “actually are” is qualitatively different, such that they produce those different sense perceptions.
Systemism-the things which appear to us in nature relate to each other at different levels of organization, and the interaction between the different elements at these different levels of interaction give rise to emergent properties which can influence other levels of interaction. A bioregion has characteristics which alter all the communities of which it is composed, just like a human being can influence its own organs through its dietary choices, or a car can wear down its tires through the collective function of driving.
These 4 axioms give rise to further questions. Are there “laws of interaction” or “laws of history” which can be defined between relata at a level of organization, or between levels? What are the different shapes of systems, mapped in terms of relationships between elements, and how can a system be mapped in a dialectical context in which it is constantly changing, elements within it disappearing or being introduced, some rapidly changing, others remaining relatively stable, and so on? And how (most crucially from my own perspective) can such a framework be applied to ethical questions, most particularly these-what are the virtues of a human being, and what are the virtues of a community? Does an analysis of other disciplines (such as ecology, history, or psychology) offer any useful insight for this specific project, or would I merely be spinning my wheels (if you haven’t come to the conclusion that I’m already doing so)? These constitute the questions for ongoing study.
Seriously, What the Hell is Dialectical Naturalism, Anyway?
Came up with some rudimentary laws of interaction, they are not exhaustive, but should provide a pretty basic foundation to grow on. Let me know what you think.
The Law of Contextualization: This law describes the interactive and context-dependent nature of entities in a system, where the meaning and significance of entities are shaped by their context. Entities cannot be understood in isolation from their context, and their meaning and significance can change depending on the context in which they are situated.
The Law of Co-Construction: This law describes the interactive and co-constructive nature of entities in a system, where entities are not simply passive objects but actively co-create their environment and reality through their interactions. Entities are not simply shaped by their environment but actively shape their environment through their interactions.
The Law of Synergy: This law describes the interactive and synergistic nature of entities in a system, where the combination of entities produces an outcome that is greater than the sum of its parts. Synergy can be achieved through the creative combination of different entities, where each entity brings its own unique qualities and strengths to the interaction.
The Law of Resilience: This law describes the interactive and adaptive nature of entities in a system, where entities can adapt and recover from disturbances or shocks. According to this law, resilience can be achieved through the diversity, redundancy, and flexibility of entities, which enable them to cope with changing conditions or disruptions. Although redundancy is not necessarily simplicity.
Darwinian concepts like evolution, natural selection, and inherited variations can be considered mechanisms that carry out some of the laws of complex systems. For example, the Law of Evolutionary Change describes how systems change over time through a process of variation, selection, and inheritance. This law is driven by the mechanism of natural selection, which results in the propagation of traits that confer fitness advantages in a particular environment. Similarly, chance events can be a mechanism that drives the emergence of new patterns or structures in complex systems, which can lead to new opportunities or challenges for entities within the system.