On Nature, a scientific perspective

Dear Tony,

I’m glad you raised the issue of the Stoic conception of Nature, which I think is both important and a bit complex to tackle. I am coming at this not as much as a philosopher but as a scientist, and particularly as an evolutionary biologist who is well aware of both Darwinism and its critics.

Let me try to follow your outline of discussion points, make some comments, and hopefully thereby stimulate our fellow proficientes to further engage in this discussion. You begin with:

“[We should discuss] the ancient Stoic notion of a determinate causal system which takes life (as instantiated by Zeus) to be foundational to nature, not something derivative and evolutionary.”

You are correct, of course, that that’s how the ancient Stoics put it. But as a modern Stoic, I’m going to agree with the first half and reject the second. Contemporary science certainly seems to agree that the universe is governed (at least at the macroscopic, as distinct from the quantum, level) by universal cause-effect. In philosophical terms, we live in a deterministic universe.

But, insofar as we can see, life is indeed “derivative,” as you put it, that is, it’s the result of an evolutionary process. The universe, according to modern science, is not a living organism endowed with reason, but rather a set of dynamic processes that behave according to the empirical regularities we (somewhat pretentiously) call the laws of nature.

The question, in my mind, is not whether the picture I sketched above is correct (provisionally, as anything in science), but rather what follows from it in terms of Stoic ethics. Which, however, is a different, if related topic, so I will leave it for another time. You continue:

“Zeus is not value-free but the basic power that endows matter with ‘seminal principles’(spermatikoi logoi). … These seminal principles are structures perhaps loosely analogous to DNA.”

As you know, that notion was adopted by the early Christian thinkers, like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Augustine, to name a few, and became their rationes seminales, an idea that still today theologians use to reconcile their faith with the modern theory of evolution.

While I have to admit to not having much sympathy for theology, there is a modern scientific idea that resembles the notion of spermatikoi logoi: the so-called Panspermia hypothesis. The notion is that the seeds (in whatever form) of life have been spreading around the universe, either by natural means (asteroids, comets) or by artificial ones (spaceships). It was first proposed by Anaxagoras in the 6th century BCE, taken up again by the Swedish scientist by Svante Arrhenius in the early 20th century, and more recently by astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. (There is even a cool episode of Star Trek—The Next Generation that explores that scenario!)

Panspermia is certainly a possibility, but it is considered to be fringe science, with very few supporters within the scientific community, at least at the moment.

Another related idea, that has seen a resurgence in recent philosophy of mind, is the notion of panpsychism, which maintains that consciousness is, somehow, an elemental property of matter. This hypothesis is also old, since it can be traced back to Thales and Plato. It’s also found in Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. Most recently it has been defended by Philip Goff in his book, Galileo’s Error.

Despite its illustrious pedigree, though, panpsychism also goes against the currently accepted scientific image of the world. The universe shows no empirically verifiable signs of being conscious, and the hypothesis runs into philosophical issues as well (such as the combination problem, first raised by William James).

All of the above makes me very skeptical, as a scientist, of any attempt to recover the Stoic notion of spermatikoi logoi.

”When the ancient Stoics characterize human beings as ‘parts’ of nature, they seem to offer us an organic and holistic notion of how we can orient ourselves into both the human world of sociability and the ecological system that sustains life.”

True, but there are other ways. Modern evolutionary theory directly connects us to all other living beings on the planet, and current ecological and ecosystem theories are empirically-based instruments to get us to think in similar ways. You mention the Stoic concept of oikeiosis, it is no coincidence that the term is also the root of the English word “ecology” (as well as of “economics”).

“While I share Larry Becker’s distaste for Stoic providence, I believe that Nature, as I try to adumbrate it, is not theologically charged in objectionable ways but fully capable of being brought up to date. ‘The way things are’ (Becker’s updated Stoic Nature) needs to incorporate life and value, or so I think.”

The Stoic notion of Nature may not be, as you say, necessarily theologically charged (though the above mentioned Church fathers may disagree!), but it is certainly in tension with modern science. That’s a problem, I think. I don’t consider any particular scientific notion to be the Truth (with a capital-T), but I do think that any philosophy that does not find agreement with science is potentially in deep trouble, as science is by far the best way we have invented so far to discover things about the natural world.

Do we need to incorporate value into our understanding of Nature? Yes, I think we do. But, again, I suggest another path, the one sketched by philosophers like Philippa Foot and primatologists like Frans De Waal: values, and morality more generally, arose gradually, by way of evolutionary processes (first biological, then cultural) in order to facilitate living and eventually flourishing in highly intelligent social species. The building blocks of our moral behaviors are found in our evolutionary cousins, species such as the bonobo chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys. Such building blocks then came to be highly refined by Homo sapiens after the appearance of language. In a sense, the Stoics intuited this, as in when Seneca (and Cicero) say that Nature gave us the beginnings of virtue and that it is up to us to develop them further by use of another gift of Nature: reason.

Finally, you mention Heraclitus and later on Whitehead’s Process and Reality and Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. Let me start with that Presocratic from Ephesus. His intuition that everything changes, panta rhei, turns out to be correct according to modern science. The universe is not made of things, based on what we know from fundamental physics, but of constantly changing patterns. See the wonderful, if somewhat technical, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, by James Ladyman and Don Ross.

But Whitehead’s version of the same ideas, process philosophy, is undermined by increasingly untenable notions like free will and god. As for Nagel’s anti-Darwinian book, the less said the better. Anything anti-Darwinian, these days, is a non-starter, even in the hands of an intriguing and articulate thinker like Nagel.

If all of the above smells too much of scientism, I’m sorry, particularly because I’m one of those philosophers and scientists who actually have written against scientism as an ideology. But for me a fundamental principle is that one ought to keep one’s metaphysics very close to one’s epistemology, and at this historical juncture our best evidence about the fundamental nature of the cosmos seems to me to be irreconcilable with ancient Stoic metaphysics. What follows from that, especially in terms of ethics, is another story, and one well worth pursuing, at some point.

Vale,
Massimo