§81 The story told to this point—despite all its divarications, divagations, and detours—is essentially a simple one. For the greater part of human philosophical and religious and even scientific history, it was assumed by most that there was a natural and primordial identity of the structures of mind, life, and nature. All things, it was assumed, inhered in a lawful order that mental agency both mirrored and in some sense mediated through its intrinsic hierarchy of rational relations. Aristotelian aetiology provided one especially lucid scheme for defining that hierarchy, in both its structural and its dynamic properties, but that aetiology reflected a far older and more widely attested human intuition about the shape of reality and of our consciousness of it. There was, therefore, no “mind-body problem” to resolve in the remoter past for the simple reason that there was nothing outside of mind that was not already a “mental” reality. A strict dualism in kind, of the Cartesian variety, was unthinkable. Even Platonism’s separable body and soul both belonged to the same order of ideal realities and were in no sense alien to one another in nature. There were, of course, a few exceptions to this vision of things—in the history of Graeco-Roman thought, the atomism of Democritus as absorbed into the metaphysics of Epicureanism is the most notable example—but these were both vanishingly anomalous and also, when inspected closely, still not as yet materialist systems in the modern sense. In early modernity, however, the mechanical philosophy arose, first as a method or organon in aid of a desired (if ultimately unattainable) rule of pure induction in research, and then in time as a metaphysics illegitimately extracted from that method. At first, this resulted in a rupture within the unity of the older noetic picture of things, separating reality into two incommiscible but extrinsically associated spheres: that of mechanical material nature and that of spiritual or divine mind. That period soon passed, however, inasmuch as the metaphysical metastasis of the mechanical model soon began to assert its rights as a metaphysics to account for the whole of reality in its own terms. This led to a picture of nature as really nothing but mechanism, from which life and mind latterly arose either as structural extensions of mechanical principles or as inexplicably emergent secondary phenomena (or epiphenomena). In the sciences, of course, the mechanical philosophy has proved inadequate to a century of advances in physics, but not entirely metaphysically intractable to the possibilities of an alternate “mechanics.” In the life-sciences, however, for three quarters of a century that mechanical paradigm has been in collapse, though this has gone almost unnoticed by the public at large because of the obstinate persistence of the metaphysical picture that has held sway for four centuries. Now, however, the reality of the failure of the mechanical paradigm to account for living systems as living has been more and more openly acknowledged by the leading researchers in evolutionary and molecular biology, and this has led to a variety of new schools of thought about life’s origins and systems: “processual biology,” “systems biology,” “hierarchical biology,” “dispositional biology,” “bio-informatics,” “Neo-Aristotelian biology,” and so forth. Almost all of these schools remain committed to a “naturalist” account of life and mind, though really the very concept of what constitutes a natural explanation has been so altered by the data at issue that this seems merely a quaint reflex—little more than unthinking habitual resistance to the more radical implications of the shift in paradigm currently underway. In fact, it merely inhibits clear thinking. Until we have rethought “nature” at a far deeper level than we have so far succeeded in doing, the very notion of “naturalist” explanation is useless and really little more than a distraction.
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