Chapter 9: Dialectical Naturalism

Introduction

For much of the twentieth century relativism has plagued philosophical thought, casting into ever-greater philosophical doubt all claims to objective knowledge of reality. In the 1980s and 1990s the rise of postmodernism and deconstruction have given academic philosophy a further relativistic charge. Claims to objective knowledge have now become deeply problematic — and the tendency is growing, when competing claims to knowledge are debated, to end merely with an agnostic shrug.

Despite such intellectual fashions, however, it is a staple of political action in any era that it must have a philosophical grounding in objective reality. Political action presupposes that a group of people have a coherent understanding of their social condition, a belief that it is necessary and possible to change those surroundings, and the willingness to make a long-term commitment to change them. A merely existential or personal justification, which is all that relativistic philosophy provides, is inadequate, since it leaves the political actor’s choices arbitrary and susceptible to change from day to day; it provides no ethics as a foundation for political action, since it finds the very concept of objective ethics even more abhorrent than the concept of objective knowledge.

Like any political and social approach, Bookchin’s social ecology requires a philosophical grounding. Having absorbed, via the Marxist tradition, the humanism and rationalism of the Enlightenment, Bookchin retains an active commitment to these foundation stones of Western thought to construct not only his political approach but his nature philosophy. His dialectical naturalism, as he calls it, draws specifically on the dialectical tradition in Western philosophy, whose most important sources are Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Hegel’s science of logic, and Marx’s Capital.

As an adherent of the humanistic and rationalistic tradition, Bookchin holds that it is indeed possible to gain objective knowledge of first nature. As a participant in the dialectical tradition, he maintains that first nature is a reality in the process of becoming. Substance not only exists, contrary to today’s agnostics; it is developing, indeed evolving. That first nature is evolutionary makes it especially suitable for comprehension by dialectical philosophy, which emphasizes processes of directional change — that is, becoming — as opposed to being.

Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx saw reality as a developmental rather than a static process, with tendencies in the direction of evergreater differentiation, complexity, subjectivity, and wholeness. Bookchin, in keeping with his own ecological approach, melded evolutionary theory into their account, giving dialectical P.hilosophy a naturalistic dimension and rejecting earlier recourses to objective idealism (Hegel) and a crude materialism (Engels) in that tradition. And in keeping with his social anarchistic approach, he explored the libertarian dimensions of the tradition, rejecting the teleology of earlier dialectical thinkers while retaining a concept of tendency or directionality.

Like Hegel, Bookchin considers dialectics not only to give an account of the objective world but to be a mode of understanding that world. Thus, dialectical naturalism is not only an account of causation; it is also a form of reasoning.

Much ecological thinking today, Bookchin maintains, partakes of the relativism so characteristic of the twentieth century. It sees the Western mechanistic worldview as a major cause of the ecological crisis, and it considers reason to be endemic to mechanism. Indeed, such thinkers argue, the Enlightenment humanistic tradition has generally given priority to human interests over those of first nature; its emphasis on reason is merely part and parcel of this ecocidal anthropocentrism. They thus reject reason in favor of intuitionism and mysticism as a mode of apprehending — or obfuscating — reality.

Bookchin, by contrast, sees the Enlightenment itself as ecological in the sense that it refocused human attention away from God and the supernatural precisely onto first nature and naturalistic concerns. To be sure, he admits, a type of reason — the instrumental and analytical kind — has been a factor in ecological destruction as well as promoting human misery, when it has been applied inappropriately. This “conventional” reason — his shorthand name for it — focuses on mechanical causality, the separation of fact and value, and crude empiricism; it is best suited for apprehending nonprocessual phenomena. But it has been applied outside its province, to organic life-forms and especially to human society, where it engenders a one-sided and static view of developmental phenomena. Bookchin proposes that dialectical reasoning is a more appropriate mode of engagement with the organic and social worlds, since it emphasizes becoming rather than stasis and regards causes, which may be elicited, or educed, as “emergent.”

Dialectical philosophy not only furnishes a form of “ecological thinking”; it allows us to educe an objective ethic that can guide us in the present ecological crisis — one that wi II provide an objective ground for advancing an ethical socialism against the market economy, and for creating a free society.

In his discussions of ecological ethics, Bookchin has been criticized — by relativists, among others — for succumbing to the “naturalistic fallacy” — that is, for making specious analogies between first nature and second nature. He justifies the appropriateness of diversity, cooperation, and mutuality for human society, they argue, by adducing those very features in first nature. By such reasoning, they argue, we could just as easily claim that first nature is “red in tooth and claw” and use that fact to justify social Darwinism in society.

But Bookchin is not suggesting that society should mimic first nature, however benign certain aspects of it may be. Rather, he is arguing that certain tendencies — an increase in subjectivity and range of choice, for example — are objectively part of evolution and as such should be promoted wherever possible by human beings. He contends that the values that can be educed from what “should be” follow rationally from these objective potentialities in natural and social development, which exist as latent realities, not as speculations or abstract values.

This tendency toward greater consciousness and choice constitutes the potential by which the natural and social worlds may become self-conscious and self-directive — in human reason and rational action. The self-formative biosphere, including both first and second nature, could potentially find its realization in a “free nature.” Since this ecological and rational society has not yet been attained, its potentiality exists as an ethical “should be” against which we may judge the failings of present society; its attainment would be the fulfillment of human emancipation.

Objectively Grounded Ethics

(from “Rethinking Ethics, Nature, and Society,” 1985)

If we desperately need an ethics that will join the ideal with the real and give words like realism a richer, more rational meaning than they have, then we are faced with a traditional dilemma. How can we objectively validate ethical claims in an era of moral relativism, when good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and evil, even the selection of strategies for social change are completely subjectivized into matters of taste or opinion? The overstated claim that what is good for a highly personalized “me” may not be good for an equally personalized “you” speaks to the growing amorality of our time. Accordingly, such a moral relativism ... has acquired the sanctity of a constitutional precept in our system of government. It has become the standard by which to determine the criminality of behavior and the guiding principles of diplomacy, religion, politics, and education, not to mention business and personal affairs. The subjectivization of behavioral precepts reflects the universal opportunism of the time; its emphasis is on operational ways of life as distinguished from philosophical ones, especially on ways to survive and function rather than on ideas imbued with meaning.

That moral relativism can deliver us to a totally noncritical view of a world in which mere taste and fleeting opinion justify anything, including nuclear immolation, has been stressed enough not to require further elucidation. If mere opinion suffices to validate social behavior, then the social order itself can be validated simply by public opinion polls. Hence, whether capital punishment is “right” or “wrong” ceases to be an ethical question about the sanctity of life. The issue becomes a problem of juggling percentages, which may justify the slaughter of homicidal felons during one year and their right to live during another. Whether the figures of our polls go up or down can decide whether a given number of people will be put to death or not. Carried to its logical conclusion, this personalistic, operational view of morality can justify a totalitarian society, which abolishes the very claims of the individual. It was not from a sense of irony or perversity that visitors to Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s applauded a fascist regime because Italian trains operated on time. The efficiency of a social system and mere matters of personal convenience were identified with its claims to be the embodiment of the public welfare.

To exorcize moral relativism, with its distasteful extensions into a politics of lesser evils and a practice structured around risk-versus-benefit calculations, is a vexing problem indeed. The converse of a radical moral relativism is a radical moral absolutism, which can be as totalitarian in its power to control as its relativistic opposite is democratic in its power to relax. Both live in a curious intellectual symbiosis; the seeming pluralism of a moral democracy has been known to encompass a fascistic ethics as easily as an anarchic one — which raises the question of how to keep a democracy from voting itself out of existence.

Suffice it to say that moral absolutism is neither better nor worse than the concrete message it has to offer. An ethics grounded in ecology can yield a salad of “natural laws” that are as tyrannical in their conclusions as the chaos of moral relativism is precariously wayward. To appeal from ecology to God is to leap from nature to supernature — that is, ironically, from the human subject as it exists in the real world to the way it exists in the imagination. Religious precepts are the products of priests and visionaries, not of an objective world from which we can gain an ethical direction that is the commanding dictum neither of “natural law” on the one hand nor of supernatural “law” on the other. We have learned only too well that Hitler’s “blood and soil” naturism, like Stalin’s cosmological “dialectics,” can be used as viciously as notions of “natural law” (with all their Darwinian connotations of “fitness to survive” and “natural selection”) to collect millions of people in concentration camps, where they are worked to death, incinerated, or both.

Indeed, the suspicion surrounding the choice of nature as a ground for ethics is justified by a history of nature philosophies that gave validity to oligarchy (Plato), slavery (Aristotle), hierarchy (Aquinas), necessity (Spinoza), and domination (Marx), to single out the betterknown thinkers of Western philosophy. Rarely indeed has nature itself been seen as a nascent domain of freedom, selfhood, and consciousness. Almost invariably, Western thinkers have dealt with the natural world as a wilderness that has always been hostile to humanity or controlled by “natural law,” a lawfulness unerring in its necessitarian relationships.

It is here that social ecology fills a void in an objective ethics that is neither absolutist nor relativist, authoritarian nor chaotic, necessitarian nor arbitrary — with all the pitfalls for humanity that these paired notions have yielded. Given social ecology’s emphasis on nature’s fecundity, on its thrust toward increasing variety, on its limitless capacity to differentiate life-forms and its development of richer, more varied evolutionary pathways that steadily involve ever-more complex species, our vision of the natural world begins to change. We no longer need look upon it as a necessitarian, withholding, or stingy redoubt of blind cruelty and harsh determinism. Although never a “realm of freedom,” nature is not reducible to an equally fictitious “realm of necessity,” as earlier philosophers, social thinkers, and scientists claimed. The possibility of freedom and individuation is opened up by the rudimentary forms of self-selection, perhaps even “choice,” if you will, of the most nascent and barely formed kind that emerges from the increasing complexity of species and their alternate pathways of evolution. Here, without doing violence to the facts, we can begin to point to a thrust in evolution that contains the potentialities of freedom and individuation. Here, too, we can see certain premises for social life — conceived, to be sure, as the institutionalization of the animal community into a potentially rational, self-governing form of association — and, owing to the ever-greater complexity of the nervous system and brain, for the emergence of reason itself.

This ensemble of ideas, I submit, provides us with the basis for an ecological ethics that sees selfhood, reason, and freedom as emerging from nature — not in sharp opposition to nature. Natural evolution over time gives rise from within itself to a rich wealth of gradations that open the way to social evolution — in short, two evolutionary pathways in which one is parent to the other. The traditional dualism in human thought that pitted humanity against animality, society against nature, freedom against necessity, mind against body, and in its most insidious hierarchical form, man against woman is transcended by due recognition of the continuity between the two, but without a reductionism or “oneness” that yields, in Hegel’s words, “a night in which all cows are black.”[70] This transcendence is achieved historically, not by arguing out the problem from within the trenches of biology and society — as though each could be discussed and explored separately from the other — and then constructing some kind of mechanical apparatus to “bridge” the gap between these dualities. With the use of an evolutionary approach to explain the evolution of humanity out of animality, society out of nature, and mind out of body, we shed sociobiology’s tyrannical “morality of the gene.” We also free ourselves from antihumanism’s reductionist dissolution of human uniqueness into a cosmic “community” in which ants are equatable with people, from the infamous “lifeboat ethic” that denies the need to share the means of life with others who are less privileged, from an overtly National Socialist outlook that validates the authority of self-appointed “supermen” to dominate “subhumans,” and from a Stalinist reduction of human beings to the raw material of a “History” governed by the inexorable “laws” of dialectical materialism.

Let me emphasize that social ecology, while viewing nature as a ground for an ethics of freedom and individuation, does not see an inexorable “lawfulness” at work that derives the human from the nonhuman or society from nature. Social ecology is not only a philosophy of process, it is also a philosophy of potentiality. Potentiality involves a sensitivity to the latent possibilities that inhere in a given constellation of phenomena, not a surrender to predetermined inevitability. It is the capability “to be” that is not as yet in being, a process in which the conditions for a specific line of development exist but have yet to achieve fruition as a “whole” with all its wealth of fullness, self-development, and uniqueness. Analogies more often tell us what this approach to reality is than propositional elucidations: the acorn, for example, which has the potentiality to become an oak tree or the human embryo which has the potentiality to become a fully mature and creative adult. This notion, in any case, is a message of freedom, not of necessity; it speaks to an immanent striving for realization, not to a predetermined certainty of completion. What is potential in an acorn that yields an oak tree or in a human embryo that yields a mature, creative adult is equivalent to what is potential in nature that yields society and what is potential in society that yields freedom, selfhood, and consciousness.

A Philosophical Naturalism

(from the introduction to The Philosophy of Social Ecology, 1990)

Today, even sensitive people in growing numbers feel betrayed by the centuries-long glorification of reason, with its icy claims to efficiency, objectivity, and freedom from ethical constraint — the form of reason that has nourished particularly destructive technologies like nucleonics and weaponry. This negative popular reaction is understandable. But swerving away from a specific form of reason that is largely instrumental and coldly analytical creates problems that are no less disturbing than those questions from which we are seeking to escape.

In our aversion to an insensitive and unfeeling form of reason, we may easily opt for a cloudy intuitionism and mysticism as an alternative. Unlike instrumental and analytical reason, after all, a surrender to emotion and mythic beliefs yields cooperative feelings of “interconnectedness” with the natural world and perhaps even a caring attitude toward it. But precisely because intuition and mystical beliefs are so cloudy and arbitrary — which is to say, so un-reasoned — they may also “connect” us with things we really shouldn’t be connected with at all — namely, racism, sexism, and an abject subservience to charismatic leaders.

Indeed, following this intuitional alternative could potentially render our ecological outlook very dangerous. Vital as the idea of “interconnectedness” may be to our views, it has historically often been the basis of myths and supernatural beliefs that became means for social control and political manipulation. The first half of the twentieth century is in great part the story of brutal movements like National Socialism that fed on a popular antirationalism and anti-intellectualism, and a personal sense of alienation, among other things. This movement mobilized and homogenized millions of people with an antisocial, perverted “ecologistic” ideology based on intuition, with an “interconnectedness” of earth, folk, and “blood and soil” that was militaristic and murderous rather than freely communitarian. Insulated from the challenge of rational critique by its anti-intellectualism and mythic nationalism, the National Socialist movement eventually turned much of Europe into a cemetery. Yet ideologically, this fascist totalitarianism had gained sustenance from the intuitional and mystical credo of the Romantic movement of the century before — something no one could have foreseen at the time.

Feeling, sentiment, and a moral outlook we surely need if instrumental and analytical reason are not to divest us of our passion for truth. But myths, mind-numbing rituals, and charismatic personalities can also rob us of the critical faculties that thought provides. Recently, a Green organization in Canada flippantly proclaimed that it seeks “cooperation” as part of its “new paradigm” rather than “confrontation,” which it considers part of the rejected “old paradigm.” In a more radical era, confrontation was the stated purpose of radical movements! The mythic and uncritical aspect of “interconnectedness” that rejects confrontation seems to have reduced this organization to the level of outright accommodation with the status quo. Here, the need not only to confront the evils of our time but to uncompromisingly oppose them has disappeared into a New Age quagmire of unthinking “good vibes.” The “loving” path of compromises along which such “good vibes” lead us can easily end in sheer opportunism.

If our contemporary revolt against reason rests on the misguided belief that the only alternative to our present reality is mysticism, it also rests on the equally misguided belief that only one kind of reason exists. In reacting against instrumental and analytical forms of reason, which are usually identified with reason as such, we may well overlook other forms of reason that are organic and yet retain critical qualities; that are developmental and yet retain analytical insights; that are ethical and yet retain contact with reality. The “value-free” rationalism that we normally identify with the physical sciences and technology is in fact not the only form of reason that Western philosophy has developed over the centuries — I refer specifically to the great tradition of dialectical reason that originated in Greece some twenty-five centuries ago and reached its high point, but by no means its completion, in the logical works of Hegel.

What dialectical thinkers from Heraclitus onward have had in common, in varying degrees, is a view of reality as developmental — of Being as an ever-unfolding Becoming. Ever since Plato created a dualism between a supranatural world of ideal forms and a transient world of imperfect sensible copies, the perplexing question of identity amid change and change amid identity has haunted Western philosophy. Instrumental and analytical forms of reason — what I will here generically call conventional reason — rest on a fundamental principle, the famous “principle of identity,” or A equals A, which means that any given phenomenon can be only itself and cannot be other than what it is, or what we immediately perceive it to be, at a given moment in time. Without this principle, logical consistency in conventional reason would be impossible.

Conventional reason is based on an analysis of phenomena as precisely defined, and whose truth depends upon the internal consistency and their practicality. It focuses on a thing or phenomenon as fixed, with clear-cut boundaries that are immutable for analytical purposes. We know an entity, in this widely accepted notion of reason, when we can analyze it into its irreducible components and determine how they work as a functioning whole, so that knowledge of the entity will have operational applicability. When the boundaries that “define” a developing thing change — as, for instance, when sand becomes soilthen conventional reason treats sand as sand and soil as soil, much as if they were independent of each other. The zone of interest in this kind of rationality is a thing or phenomenon’s fixity, its independence, and its basically mechanical interaction with similar or dissimilar things and phenomena. The causality that conventional reason describes, moreover, is a matter of kinetics: one billiard ball strikes another and causes them both to move from one position to another — that is to say, by means of efficient cause. The two billiard balls are not altered by the blow but are merely repositioned on the billiards table.

But conventional reason cannot address the problem of change at all. It views a mammal, for example, as a creature marked by a highly fixed set of traits that distinguish it from everything that is not mammalian. To “know” a mammal is to explore its structure, literally to analyze it by dismembering it, to reduce it to its components, to identify its organs and their functions, and to ascertain the way they operate together to assure the mammal’s survival and reproduction. Similarly, conventional reason views a human being in terms of particular stages of the life-cycle: a person is an infant at one time, a child at another, an adolescent at still another, a youth and finally an adult. When we analyze an infant by means of conventional reason, we do not explore what it is becoming in the process of developing into an adult. Doubtless, when developmental psychologists and anatomists study an individual life-cycle, few of them — however conventional their rationality may be — ignore the fact that every infant is in the process of becoming an adult and that the two stages in the life-cycle are in various ways related to each other. But the principle of A equals A remains a basic premise. Its logical framework is the authority of consistency, and deductions almost mechanically follow from premises. Conventional reason thus serves the practical function of describing a given entity’s identity and telling us how that entity is organized to be itself. But it cannot systematically explore processes of becoming, or how a living entity is patterned as a potentiality to phase from one stage of its development into another.

Dialectical reason, unlike conventional reason, acknowledges the developmental nature of reality by asserting in one fashion or another that A equals not only A but also not-A. The dialectical thinker who examines the human life-cycle sees an infant as a self-maintaining human identity while simultaneously developing into a child, from a child into an adolescent, from an adolescent into a youth, and from a youth into an adult. Dialectical reason grasps not only how an entity is organized at a particular moment but how it is organized to go beyond that level of development and become other than what it is, even as it retains its identity. The contradictory nature of identity — notably, that A equals both A and not-A — is an intrinsic feature of identity itself. The unity of opposites is, in fact, a unity qua the emerging “other,” what Hegel called “the identity of identity and nonidentity.”

The thinking of conventional reason today is exemplified — and disastrously reinforced — by the “true or false” questions that make up most standardized tests. One must darken a box to indicate that a statement is either “true” or “false” — and do so quickly, with minimal reflection. These tests, so commonplace today, allow for no nuanced thought or awareness of transitions. That a phenomenon or statement may well be both true and false — depending on its context and its place in a process of becoming other than what it is — is excluded by the logical premise on which these tests are based. This testing procedure makes for bad mental habits among young people, who are schooled to take such tests successfully, and whose careers and future lifeways depend on their scores. But the process of thinking in the way such tests demand compartmentalizes and essentially computerizes otherwise rich minds, depriving young people of their native ability to think organically and to understand the developmental nature of the real world.

Another major presupposition of conventional reason — one that follows from its concepts of identity and causality — is that history is a layered series of separate phenomena, a mere succession of strata, each independent of the ones that preceded and followed it. These strata may be cemented together by phases, but these phases are themselves analyzed into components and explored independently of each other. Thus, Mesozoic rock strata are independent of Cenozoic, and each stratum exists very much on its own, as do the ones that cement them together. In human history, the medieval period is independent of the modern, and the former is connected to the latter by a series of independent segments, each relatively autonomous in relation to the preceding and subsequent ones. From the standpoint of conventional reason, it is not always clear how historical change occurred or what meaning history has. Despite postmodernism and present-day historical relativism, which examine history using conventional reason and thereby ravage it, there was a time in the recent past when most historians, influenced by theories of evolution and by Marxism, regarded history as a developmental phenomenon and subsequent periods as at least depending upon prior ones. It is this tradition that dialectical reason upholds.

The intuitional approach to history is no improvement over that of conventional reason — indeed, it does the opposite: it literally dissolves historical development into an undifferentiated continuum and even into a ubiquitous, all-embracing “One.” The mystical counterpart of mechanico-materialistic stratification is the reductionism that says that everything is “One” or “interconnected,” that all phenomena originated from a pulse of primal energy, like the Victorian physicist who believed that when he pounded his fist on a table, Sirius trembled, however faintly. That the universe had an origin, whatever it was, does not warrant the naive belief that the universe still “really” consists of nothing but its originating source, any more than an adult human being can be explained entirely by reference to his or her parents. This way of thinking is not far removed from the kinetic cause-effect approach of conventional reason. Nor does the “interconnectedness” of all life-forms preclude the sharp distinctions between prey and predators, or between instinctively guided life-forms and potentially rational ones. Yet these countless differentiations reflect innumerable innovations in evolutionary pathways, indeed different kinds of evolution — be they inorganic, organic, or social. Instead of apprehending things and phenomena as both differentiated and yet cumulatively related, the mystical alternative to conventional reason tends to see them, to use Hegel’s famous remark, as “a night in which all cows are black.”

Conventional reason, to be sure, has its useful side. Its internal consistency of propositions, irrespective of content, plays an indispensable role in mathematical thinking and mathematical sciences, in engineering, and in the nuts-and-bolts activities of everyday life. It is indispensable when building a bridge or a house; for such purposes, there is no point in thinking along evolutionary or developmental lines. If we used a logic based on anything but the principle of identity to build a bridge or a house, a catastrophe would no doubt occur. The physiological operations of our bodies, not to speak of the flight of birds and the pumplike workings of a mammalian heart, depend in great part upon principles we associate with conventional reason. To understand or design a mechanical entity requires a form of reason that is instrumental and an analysis of reality into its components and their functioning. The truths of conventional reason, based on consistency, are useful in these areas of life. Indeed, conventional reason has contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of the universe.

For several centuries, in fact, conventional reason held out a promise to dispel the dogmatic authority of the church, the arbitrary behavior of absolute monarchs, and the frightening ghosts of superstition — and indeed, it did a great deal to fulfill this promise. But to achieve the consistency that constitutes its fundamental principle, conventional reason removes ethics from its discourse and concerns. And as an instrument for achieving certain ends, the moral character of those ends, the values, ideals, beliefs, and theories people cherish, are irrelevant to it, arbitrary matters of personal mood and taste. With its message of identity and consistency as truth, conventional reason failed us not because it is false as such but because it has staked out too broad a claim for its own validity in explaining reality. It even redefines reality to fit its claim, just as many mathematical physicists redefine reality as that which can be formulated in mathematical terms. It should come as no surprise, then, that in our highly rationalized industrial society, conventional reason has come to seem repellent. Pervasive authority, an impersonal technocracy, an unfeeling science and insensitive, monolithic bureaucracies — the very existence of all these is imputed to reason as such .

... Let us grant that the principles of identity, of efficient causality, and of stratification do apply to a particular commonsensical reality that is rendered intelligible by their use. But when we go beyond that particular reality, we can no longer reduce the rich wealth of differentiation, flux, development, organic causality, and developmental reality to a vague “One” or to an equally vague notion of “interconnectedness.” A very considerable literature dating back to the ancient Greeks provides the basis of an organic form of reason and a developmental interpretation of reality.

With a few notable exceptions, the Platonic dualism of identity and change reverberated in one way or another throughout Western philosophy until the nineteenth century, when Hegel’s logical works largely resolved this paradox by systematically showing that identity, or self-persistence, actually expresses itself through change as an evervariegated unfolding of “unity in diversity,” to use his own words. The grandeur of Hegel’s effort has no equal in the history of Western philosophy. Like Aristotle before him, he had an “emergent” interpretation of causality, of how the implicit becomes explicit through the unfolding of its latent form and possibilities. On a vast scale over the course of two sizable volumes, he assembled nearly all the categories by which reason explains reality, and educed one from the other in an intelligible and meaningful continuum that is graded into a richly differentiated, increasingly comprehensive, or “adequate” whole, to use some of his terms.

We may reject what Hegel called his “absolute idealism,” the transition from his logic to his philosophy of nature, his teleological culmination of the subjective and objective in a godlike “Absolute,” and his idea of a cosmic Spirit (Geist). Hegel rarefied dialectical reason into a cosmological system that verged on the theological by trying to reconcile it with idealism, absolute knowledge, and a mystical unfolding logos that he often designated “God.” Unfamiliar with ecology, Hegel rejected natural evolution as a viable theory in favor of a static hierarchy of Being. By the same token, Friedrich Engels intermingled dialectical reason with natural “laws” that more closely resemble the premises of nineteenth-century physics than a plastic metaphysics or an organismic outlook, producing a crude dialectical materialism. Indeed, so enamored was Engels of matter and motion as the irreducible “attributes” of Being that a kineticism based on mere motion invaded his dialectic of organic development.

To dismiss dialectical reason because of the failings of Hegel’s idealism and Engels’s materialism, however, would be to lose sight of the extraordinary coherence that dialectical reason can furnish and its extraordinary applicability to ecology — particularly to an ecology rooted in evolutionary development. Despite Hegel’s own prejudices against organic evolution, what stands out amid the metaphysical and often theological archaisms in his work is his overall education of logical categories as the subjective anatomy of a developmental reality. What is needed is to free this form of reason from both the quasi-mystical and the narrowly scientistic worldviews that in the past have made it remote from the living world; to separate it from Hegel’s empyrean, basically antinaturalistic dialectical idealism and the wooden, often scientistic dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxists. Shorn of both its idealism and its materialism, dialectical reason may be rendered naturalistic and ecological and conceived as a naturalistic form of thinking.

This dialectical naturalism offers an alternative to an ecology movement that rightly distrusts conventional reason. It can bring coherence to ecological thinking, and it can dispel arbitrary and antiintellectual tendencies toward the sentimental, cloudy, and theistic at best and the dangerously antirational, mystical, and potentially reactionary at worst. As a way of reasoning about reality, dialectical naturalism is organic enough to give a more liberatory meaning to vague words like interconnectedness and holism without sacrificing intellectuality. It can answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this essay: what nature is, humanity’s place in nature, the thrust of natural evolution, and society’s relationship with the natural world. Equally important, dialectical naturalism adds an evolutionary perspective to ecological thinking — despite Hegel’s rejection of natural evolution and Engels’s recourse to the mechanistic evolutionary theories of a century ago. Dialectical naturalism discerns evolutionary phenomena fluidly and plastically, yet it does not divest evolution of rational interpretation. Finally, a dialectic that has been “ecologized,” or given a naturalistic core, and a truly developmental understanding of reality could provide the basis for a living ecological ethics....

Minimally, we must assume that there is order in the world, an assumption that even ordinary science must make if it is to exist. Minimally, too, we must assume that there are growth and processes that lead to differentiation, not merely the kind of motion that results from push-pull, gravitational, electromagnetic, and similar forces. Finally, minimally, we must assume that there is some kind of directionality toward ever-greater differentiation or wholeness insofar as potentiality is realized in its full actuality. We need not return to medieval teleological notions of an unswerving predetermination in a hierarchy of Being to accept this directionality; rather, we need only point to the fact that there is a generally orderly development in the real world or, to use philosophical terminology, a “logical” development when a development succeeds in becoming what it is structured to become.

In Hegel’s logical works, as in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, dialectics is more than a remarkable “method” for dealing with reality. Conceived as the logical expression of a wide-ranging form of developmental causality, logic, in Hegel’s work, joins hands with ontology. Dialectic is simultaneously a way of reasoning and an account of the objective world, with an ontological causality. As a form of reasoning, the most basic categories in dialectic — even such vague categories as Being and Nothing — are differentiated by their own inner logic into fuller, more complex categories. Each category, in turn, is a potentiality that by means of eductive thinking, directed toward an exploration of its latent and implicit possibilities, yields logical expression in self-realization, or what Hegel called “actuality” (Wirklichkeit).

Precisely because it is also a system of causality, dialectic is ontological, objective, and therefore naturalistic, as well as a form of reason. In ontological terms, dialectical causality is not merely motion, force, or changes of form but things and phenomena in development. Indeed, since all Being is Becoming, dialectical causality is the differentiation of potentiality into actuality, in the course of which each new actuality becomes the potentiality for further differentiation and actualization. Dialectics explicates how processes occur not only in the natural world but in the social.

How the implicit but relatively undifferentiated form latent with possibility becomes a more differentiated form that is true to its potential form is clarified in Hegel’s own words. “The plant, for example, does not lose itself in mere indefinite change,” he writes. It has a distinct directionality — in the case of conscious beings, purpose as well. “From the germ much is produced when at first nothing was to be seen, but the whole of what is brought forth, if not developed, is yet hidden and ideally contained within itself.” It is worth noting, in this passage, that what may be “brought forth” is not necessarily developed: an acorn, for example, may become food for a squirrel or wither on a concrete sidewalk, rather than develop into what it is potentially constituted to become — notably, an oak tree. “The principle of this projection into existence is that the germ cannot remain merely implicit,” Hegel goes on to observe, “but is impelled towards development, since it presents the contradiction of being only implicit.”[71]

What we vaguely call the “immanent” factors that produce a self-unfolding of a development, the Hegelian dialectic regards as the contradictory nature of a being that is unfulfilled in the sense that it is only implicit or incomplete. As mere potentiality, it has not “come to itself,” so to speak. A thing or phenomenon in dialectical causality remains unsettled, unstable, in tension — much as a fetus ripening toward birth strains to be born because of the way it is constituted — until it develops itself into what it “should be” in all its wholeness or fullness. It cannot remain in endless tension or “contradiction” with what it is organized to become without warping or undoing itself. It must ripen into the fullness of its being.

Modern science has tried to describe nearly all phenomena in terms of efficient cause or the kinetic impact of forces on a thing or phenomenon, reacting against medieval conceptions of causality in terms of final cause — notably, in terms of the existence of a deity who impels development, if only by virtue of “His” own “perfection.” Hegel’s notion of “imperfection” — more appropriately, of “inadequacy” or of contradiction — as an impelling factor for development partly went beyond both efficient and final notions of causality. I say “partly” for a specific reason: the philosophical archaisms that run through Hegel’s dialectic weaken his position from a naturalistic viewpoint. From Plato’s time until the beginning of the modern world, theological notions of perfection, infinity, and eternality permeated philosophical thought. Plato’s “ideal forms” were the “perfect” and the “eternal,” of which all existential things were copies. Aristotle’s God, particularly as it was Christianized by the medieval Scholastics, was the “perfect” One toward which all things strove, given their finite “imperfection” and inherent limitations. In this way a supranatural ideal defined the “imperfection” of natural phenomena and thereby dynamized them in their striving toward “perfection.” There is an element of this quasi-theological thinking in Hegel’s notion of contradiction: the whole course of the dialectic culminates in the “Absolute,” which is “perfect” in its fullness, wholeness, and unity.

Dialectical naturalism, on the contrary, conceives finiteness and contradiction as distinctly natural in the sense that things and phenomena are incomplete and unactualized in their development — not “imperfect” in any idealistic or supranatural sense. Until they are what they have been constituted to become, they exist in a dynamic tension. A dialectical naturalist view thus has nothing to do with the supposition that finite things or phenomena fail to approximate a Platonic ideal or a Scholastic God. Rather, they are still in the process of becoming or, more mundanely, developing. Dialectical naturalism thus does not terminate in a Hegelian Absolute at the end of a cosmic developmental path, but rather advances the vision of an ever-increasing wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation and subjectivity.

Dialectical contradiction exists within the structure of a thing or phenomenon by virtue of a formal arrangement that is incomplete, inadequate, implicit, and unfulfilled in relation to what it “should be.” A naturalistic framework does not limit us to efficient causality with a mechanistic tilt. Nor need we have recourse to theistic “perfection” to explain the almost magnetic eliciting of a development. Dialectical causality is uniquely organic because it operates within a development — the degree of form of a thing or phenomenon, the way in which that form is organized, the tensions or “contradictions” to which its formal ensemble gives rise, and its metabolic self-maintenance and self-development. Perhaps the most suitable word for this kind of development is growth — growth not by mere accretion but by a truly immanent process of organic self-formation in a graded and increasingly differentiated direction.

A distinctive continuum emerges from dialectical causality. Here cause and effect are not merely coexisting phenomena or “correlations,” to use a common positivist term; nor are they clearly distinct from each other, such that a cause externally impacts upon a thing or phenomenon to produce an effect mechanically. Dialectical causality is cumulative: the implicit or “in itself” (an sich), to use Hegel’s terminology, is not simply replaced or negated by its more developed explicit or “for itself” (fur sich); rather, it is absorbed into and developed beyond the explicit into a fuller, more differentiated, and more adequate form — the Hegelian “in and for itself” (an und fur sich ). Insofar as the implicit is fully actualized by becoming what it is constituted to be, the process is truly rational, that is to say, it is fulfilled by virtue of its internal logic. The continuum of a development is cumulative, containing the history of its development.

Reality is not simply what we experience: there is a sense in which the rational has its own reality. Thus, there are existing realities that are irrational and unrealized realities that are rational. A society that fails to actualize its potentialities for human happiness and progress is “real” enough in the sense that it exists, but it is less than truly social. It is incomplete and distorted insofar as it persists, and hence it is irrational. It is less than what it should be socially, just as a generally defective animal is less than what it should be biologically. Although it is “real” in an existential sense, it is unfulfilled and hence “unreal” in terms of its potentialities.

Dialectical naturalism asks which is truly real — the incomplete, aborted, irrational “what is,” or the complete, fully developed, rational “what should be.” Reason, cast as dialectical causality as well as dialectical logic, yields an unconventional understanding of reality. A process that follows its immanent self-development to its logical actuality is more properly “real” than a given “what is” that is aborted or distorted and hence, in Hegelian terms, “untrue” to its possibilities. Reason has the obligation to explore the potentialities that are latent in any social development and educe its authentic actualization, its fulfillment and “truth” through a new and more rational social dispensation.

It would be philosophically frivolous to embrace the “what is” of a thing or phenomenon as constituting its “reality” without considering it in the light of the “what should be” that would logically emerge from its potentialities. Nor do we ordinarily do so in practice. We rightly evaluate an individual in terms of his or her known potentialities, and we form understandable judgments about whether the individual has truly “fulfilled” himself or herself. Indeed, in privacy, individuals make such self-evaluations repeatedly, which may have important effects upon their behavior, creativity, and self-esteem.

The “what is,” conceived as the strictly existential, is a slippery “reality.” Accepted empirically without qualification, it excludes the past because, strictly speaking, the past no longer “is.” At the same time, it yields a discontinuity with the future that — again, strictly speaking — has yet to “exist.” What is more, the “what is,” conceived in strictly empirical terms, excludes subjectivity — certainly conceptual thought — from any role in the world but a spectatorial one, which may or may not be a force in behavior.

In the logic of a strictly empirical philosophy, mind simply registers or coordinates experience. “Reality” is a given temporal moment that exists as an experienced segment of an assumed continuum. The “real” is a frozen “here and now” to which we merely add an adventitious past and presume a future in order to experience reality intelligibly. The kind of radical empiricism advanced by David Hume replaced the notion of Being as Becoming with the experience of a given moment that renders thinking of the past as “unreal” as making inferences about the future. This kind of “reality,” as Hume himself fully sensed, is impossible to live with in everyday life; hence he was obliged to define continuity, although he did so in terms of custom and habit, not in terms of causality. Conceiving immediate empirical reality as the totality of the “real” essentially banishes hindsight and foresight as little more than mere conveniences. Indeed, a strictly empirical approach dissolves the logical tissue that integrates the organic, cumulative continuity of the past with the present and that of both with the future.

By contrast, in a naturalistic dialectic, both past and future are part of a cumulative, logical, and objective continuum that includes the present. Reason is not only a means for analyzing and interpreting reality; it extends the boundaries of reality beyond the immediately experienced present. Past, present, and future are a cumulatively graded process that thought can truly interpret and render meaningful. We can legitimately explore such a process in terms of whether its potentialities have been realized, aborted, or warped.

In a naturalistic dialectic, the word reality thus acquires two distinctly different meanings. There is the immediately present empirical “reality” — or Realitat, to use Hegel’s language — that need not be the fulfillment of a potentiality, and there is the dialectical “actuality” — Wirklichkeit — that constitutes a complete fulfillment of a rational process. Even though Wirklichkeit appears as a projection of thought into a future that has yet to be existentially realized, the potentiality from which that Wirklichkeit develops is as existential as the world we sense in direct and immediate ordinary experience. For example, an egg patently and empirically exists, even though the bird whose potential it contains has yet to develop and reach maturity. Just so, the given potentiality of any process exists and constitutes the basis for a process that should be realized. Hence, the potentiality does exist objectively, even in empirical terms. Wirklichkeit is what dialectical naturalism infers from an objectively given potentiality; it is present, if only implicitly, as an existential fact, and dialectical reason can analyze and subject it to processual inferences. Even in the seemingly most subjective projections of speculative reason, Wirklichkeit, the “what should be,” is anchored in a continuum that emerges from an objective potentiality, or “what is.”

Dialectical naturalism is thus integrally wedded to the objective world — a world in which Being is Becoming. Let me emphasize that dialectical naturalism not only grasps reality as an existentially unfolding continuum, but it also forms an objective framework for making ethical judgments. The “what should be” becomes an ethical criterion for judging the truth or validity of an objective “what is.” Thus ethics is not merely a matter of personal taste and values; it is factually anchored in the world itself as an objective standard of selfrealization. Whether a society is “good” or “bad,” moral or immoral, for example, can be objectively determined by whether it has fulfilled its potentialities for rationality and morality. Potentialities that are themselves actualizations of a dialectical continuum present the challenge of ethical self-fulfillment — not simply in the privacy of the mind but in the reality of the processual world. Herein lies the only meaningful basis for a truly ethical socialism or anarchism, one that is more than a body of subjective preferences that rest on opinion and taste....

If dialectical naturalism is to explain things or phenomena properly, its ontology and premises must be understood as more than mere motion and interconnection. A continuum is a more relevant premise for dialectical reason than either motion or the interdependence of phenomena. It was one of the failings of “dialectical materialism” that it premised dialectic on the nineteenth century’s physics of matter and motion, from which development somehow managed to emerge. It would be just as limited to replace the entelechial processes involved in differentiation and the realization of potentiality with “interconnectedness.” A dialectic based merely on a notion of “interconnectedness” would tend to be more descriptive than eductive; it would not clearly explain how interdependencies lead to a graded entelechial development — that is, to self-formation through the self-realization of potentiality....

The continuum that dialectical reason investigates is a highly graded, richly entelechial, logically eductive, and self-directive process of unfolding toward ever-greater differentiation, wholeness, and adequacy, insofar as each potentiality is fully actualized given a specific range of development. External factors, internal rearrangements, accidents, even gross irrationalities may distort or preclude a potential development. But insofar as order does exist in reality and is not simply imposed upon it by mind, reality has a rational dimension. More colloquially, there is a “logic” in the development of phenomena, a general directiveness that accounts for the fact that the inorganic did become organic, as a result of its implicit capacity for organicity; and for the fact that the organic did become more differentiated and metabolically self-maintaining and self-aware, as a result of potentialities that made for highly developed hormonal and nervous systems.

Stephen Jay Gould may luxuriate in the randomness — actually, the fecundity — of nature, and poststructuralists may try to dissolve both natural and social evolution into an aggregation of unrelated events, but directiveness of organic evolution unremittingly surfaces in even these rather chaotic collections of “brute facts.” Like it or not, human beings, primates, mammals, vertebrates, and so forth back to the most elementary protozoans are a sequential presence in the fossil record itself, each emerging out of preceding life-forms. As Gould asserts, the Burgess Shale of British Columbia attests to a large variety of fossils that cannot be classified into a unilinear “chain of being.” But far from challenging the existence of directionality in evolution toward greater subjectivity, the Burgess Shale provides extraordinary evidence of the fecundity of nature. Nature’s fecundity rests on the existence of chance, indeed variety, as a precondition for complexity in organisms and ecosystems and, by virtue of that fecundity, for the emergence of humanity from potentialities that involve increasing subjectivity.

Our ontological and eductive premise for dialectical naturalism, however, remains the graded continuum I have already described — and the Burgess Shale notwithstanding, human beings are not only patently here, but our evolution can be explained. Dialectical reason cuts across the grain of conventional ways of thinking about the natural world and mystical interpretations of it. Nature is not simply the landscape we see from behind a picture window, in a moment disconnected from those that preceded and will follow it; nor is it a vista from a lofty mountain peak.... Nature is certainly all of these things — but it is significantly more. Biological nature is above all the cumulative evolution of ever-differentiating and increasingly complex life-forms with a vibrant and interactive inorganic world. Following in a tradition that goes back at least to Cicero, we can call this relatively unconscious natural development “first nature.” It is first nature in the primal sense of a fossil record that clearly leads to mammalian, primate, and human life — not to mention its extraordinary fecundity of other life-forms — and it is first nature that exhibits a high degree of orderly continuity in the actualization of potentialities that made for more complex and self-aware or subjective life-forms. Insofar as this continuity is intelligible, it has meaning and rationality in terms of its results: the elaboration of life-forms that can conceptualize, understand, and communicate with each other in increasingly symbolic terms.

In their most differentiated and fully developed forms, these self-reflexive and communicative capacities are conceptual thought and language. The human species has these capacities to an extent that is unprecedented in any existing life-form. Humanity’s awareness of itself, its ability to generalize this awareness to the level of a highly systematic understanding of its environment in the form of philosophy, science, ethics, and esthetics, and finally, its capacity to alter itself and its environment systematically by means of knowledge and technology place it beyond the realm of the subjectivity that exists in first nature.

By singling out humanity as a unique life-form that can consciously change the entire realm of first nature, I do not claim that first nature was “made” to be “exploited” by humanity, as those ecologists critical of “anthropocentrism” sometimes charge. The idea of a made world has its origin in theology, notably in the belief that a supernatural being created the natural world and that evolution is infused with a theistic principle, both in the service of human needs. By the same token, humans cannot “exploit” nature, owing to a “commanding” place in a supposed “hierarchy” of nature. Words like commanding, exploitation, and hierarchy are actually social terms that describe how people relate to each other; applied to the natural world, they are merely anthropomorphic.

Far more relevant from the standpoint of dialectical naturalism is the fact that humanity’s vast capacity to alter first nature is itself a product of natural evolution — not of a deity or the embodiment of a cosmic Spirit. From an evolutionary viewpoint, humanity has been constituted to intervene actively, consciously, and purposively into first nature with unparalleled effectiveness and to alter it on a planetary scale. To denigrate this capacity is to deny the thrust of natural evolution itself toward organic complexity and subjectivity — the potentiality of first nature to actualize itself in self-conscious intellectuality. One may choose to argue that this thrust was pre-determined with inexorable certainty as a result of a deity, or one may contend that it was strictly fortuitous, or one may claim — as I wouldthat there is a natural tendency toward greater complexity and subjectivity in first nature, arising from the very interactivity of matter, indeed a nisus toward self-consciousness. But what is decisive here is the compelling fact that humanity’s natural capacity to consciously intervene into and act upon first nature has given rise to a “second nature,” a cultural, social, and political “nature” that today has all but absorbed first nature.

There is no part of the world that has not been profoundly affected by human activity — neither the remote fastnesses of Antarctica nor the canyons of the ocean’s depths. Even wilderness areas require protection from human intervention; much that is designated as wilderness today has already been profoundly affected by human activity. Indeed, wilderness can be said to exist primarily as a result of a human decision to preserve it. Nearly all the nonhuman life-forms that exist today are, like it or not, to some degree in human custody, and whether they are preserved in their wild lifeways depends largely on human attitudes and behavior.

That second nature is the outcome of evolution in first nature and can thereby be designated as natural does not mean that second nature is necessarily creative or even fully conscious of itself in any evolutionary sense. Second nature is synonymous with society and human internal nature, both of which are undergoing evolution for better or worse. Although social evolution is grounded in, indeed phases out of, organic evolution, it is also profoundly different from organic evolution. Consciousness, will, alterable institutions, and the operation of economic forces and technics may be deployed to enhance the organic world or carry it to the point of destruction. Second nature as it exists today is marked by monstrous attributes, notably hierarchy, class, the state, private property, and a competitive market economy that obliges economic rivals to grow at the expense of each other or perish. This ethical judgment, I may note, has meaning only if we assume that there is potentiality and self-directiveness in organic evolution toward greater subjectivity, consciousness, self-reflexivity; by inference, it is the responsibility of the most conscious of life-formshumanity — to be the “voice” of a mute nature and to act to intelligently foster organic evolution.

If this tendency or nisus in organic evolution is denied, there is no reason why the human species, like any other species, should not utilize its capacities to serve its own needs or attain its own “self-realization” at the expense of other life-forms that impede its interests and desires. To denounce humanity for “exploiting” organic nature, “degrading” it, “abusing” it, and behaving “anthropocentrically” is simply an oblique way of acknowledging that second nature is the bearer of moral responsibilities that do not exist in the realm of first nature. It is to acknowledge that if all life-forms have an “intrinsic worth” that should be respected, they have it only because human intellectual, moral, and esthetic abilities have attributed it to them — abilities that no other life-form possesses. It is only human beings that can even formulate the concept of “intrinsic worth” and endow it with ethical responsibility. The “intrinsic worth” of human beings is thus patently exceptional, indeed extraordinary.

It is essential to emphasize that second nature is, in fact, an unfinished, indeed inadequate, development of nature as a whole. Hegel viewed human history as a slaughterbench. Hierarchy, class, the state, and the like are evidence — and, by no means, purely accidental evidence — of the unfulfilled potentialities of nature to actualize itself as a nature that is self-consciously creative. Humanity as it now exists is not nature rendered self-conscious. The future of the biosphere depends overwhelmingly on whether second nature can be transcended in a new system of social and organic conciliation, one that I would call “free nature” — a nature that would diminish the pain and suffering that exist in both first and second nature. Free nature, in effect, would be a conscious and ethical nature, an ecological society that I have explored in detail elsewhere.

Ecologizing the Dialectic

(from “Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach,” 1987)

It is eminently natural for humanity to create a second nature from its evolution in “first nature.” By second nature, I mean the development of uniquely human culture, with a wide variety of institutionalized human communities, effective human technics, richly symbolic languages, and carefully managed sources of nutriment.... The real question, I submit, is not whether second nature parallels, opposes, or blandly “participates” in an “egalitarian” first nature; rather, it is how second nature is derived from first nature. More specifically, in what ways did the highly graded and many-phased evolution from first nature into second give rise to social institutions, forms of interactions between people, and an interaction between first and second nature that, in the best of cases, enriches both and yields a second nature that has an evolutionary development of its own? The ecological crisis we face today is very much a crisis in the emergence of society out of biology, in the problems (the rise of hierarchy, domination, patriarchy, classes, and the state) that unfolded with this development, and in the liberatory pathways that provide an alternative to this warped history.

The fact that first and second nature exist and can never be dualized into “parallels” or simplistically reduced to each other accounts, in great part, for my phrase social ecology. Additionally, social ecology has the special meaning that the ecological crisis that beleaguers us stems from a social crisis, a crisis that the crude biologism of deep ecology generally ignores. Still further, that the resolution of this social crisis can only be achieved by reorganizing society along rational lines, imbued with an ecological philosophy and sensibility....

An ecological dialectic would have to address the fact that Aristotle and Hegel did not work with an evolutionary theory of nature but rather saw the natural world more as a scala naturae, a ladder of “being,” than as a flowing continuum. An ecological dialectic introduces evolution into this tradition and replaces the notion of a scala naturae with a richly mediated continuum. Both thinkers were more profoundly influenced by Plato than their writings would seem to indicate, with the result that in the case of Hegel, we move within a realm of concepts more than history (however historical Hegel’s dialectic invariably was). Hegel was strongly preoccupied with the “idea” of nature rather than with its existential details, although he honored this preoccupation in the breach. Finally, the overarching teleology of the two philosophers tends to subordinate the contingency, spontaneity, and creativity that mark natural phenomena. Hegel, with his strong theological bent, terminated the unfolding of the world in an “Absolute” that encompasses it in an identity of subject and object. In an ecological dialectic, by contrast, there would be no terminality that could culminate in a God or an Absolute. “Actuality,” to use Hegel’s special term, is the almost momentary culmination of maturity, so that the objectivity of the potential, which is crucial for an objective ethics, is subordinated to its actualization....

Dialectic, let me emphasize, is not merely change, motion, or even process, all banal imputations to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor can it be subsumed under “process philosophy.” Dialectic is development, not only change; it is derivation, not only motion; it is mediation, not mere process; and it is cumulative, not only continuous. That it is also change, motion, process, and a continuum tells us only part of its true content. But denied its immanent self-directiveness and its entelechial education of the potential into the actual, this “process philosophy,” indeed this remarkable notion of causality, ceases to be dialectic. Instead, it becomes a mere husk that our current flock of “eco”-faddists can reduce to “kinetics,” “dynamics,” “fluctuations,” and “feedback loops” — the same mechanistic verbiage with which systems theory dresses itself up as a developmental philosophy.

As Hegel warned in the course of educing the complexity of the dialectical process: knowledge has “no other object than to draw out what is inward or implicit and thus to become objective.” But if

that which is implicit comes into existence, it certainly passes into change, yet it remains one and the same. ... The plant, for example, does not lose itself in mere indefinite change. From the germ much is produced when at first nothing was to be seen; but the whole of what is brought forth, if not developed, is yet hidden and ideally contained within itself. The principle of this projection into existence is that the germ cannot remain merely implicit, but is impelled toward development, since it presents the contradiction of being only implicitly and yet not desiring to be so.[72]

Thus dialectic is not wayward motion, the mere kinetics of change. There is a rational “end in view” — not one that is preordained, to state this point from an ecological viewpoint rather than a theological one, but one that actualizes what is implicit in the potential. Every “if-then” proposition is premised not on any if that springs into one’s head like a gambler’s hunch; it posits a potentiality that has its ancestry in the dialectical processes that preceded it....

In the organic world, the metabolic activity of the simplest life-forms constitutes the sense of self-identity, however germinal, from which nature acquires a rudimentary subjectivity. Not only does this rudimentary subjectivity (which reductionism necessarily cannot encompass) derive from the metabolic process of self-maintenance, a process that defines any life-form as a unique whole; it extends itself beyond self-maintenance to become a striving activity, not unlike the development from the vegetative to the animative, that ultimately yields mind, will, and the potentiality for freedom. Conceived dialectically, organic evolution is, in a broad sense, subjective insofar as life-forms begin to exercise choices in adapting to new environments — a conception that stands much at odds with that clearly definable fixity we blissfully call “clear thinking.” Systems theory enters into the reductionist tableau in a sinister way: by dissolving the subjective element in biological phenomena so that they can be treated as mathematical symbols, systems theory permits evolutionary interaction, subjective development, and even process itself, to be taken over by “the system,” just as the individual, the family, and the community are destructured into “the System” embodied by the economic corporation and the state. Life ceases to have subjectivity and becomes a mechanism in which the tendency of life-forms toward ever-greater elaboration is replaced with “feedback loops,” and their evolutionary antecedents with programmed “information.” A “systems view of life” literally conceives of life as a system, not only as “fluctuations” and “cycles” — mechanistic as these concepts are in themselves.

Despite the external selective factors with which Darwinians describe evolution, the tendency of life toward a greater complexity of selfhood — a tendency that yields increasing degrees of subjectivity — constitutes the internal or immanent impulse of evolution toward growing self-awareness. This evolutionary dialectic constitutes the essence of life as a self-maintaining organism that bears the potential for the development of self-conscious organisms. Dialectic, in effect, is not merely a “logic” or a “method” that can be bounced around and “applied” promiscuously to a content. It has no “handbook” other than reason itself to guide those who seek to develop a dialectical sensibility. Dialectic can no more be applied to problems in engineering than can Einstein’s general theory of relativity be applied to plumbing; these problems can best be resolved by conventional forms of logic, common sense, and the pragmatic knowledge acquired through experience. Dialectic can only explicate a rationally developmental phenomenon, just as systems theory can only explicate the workings of a fluctuating and cyclical system. The kind of verification that validates or invalidates the soundness of dialectical reasoning, in turn, must be developmental, not relatively static or for that matter “fluctuating” kinds of phenomena....

Freed of its theological trappings, dialectic explains, with a power beyond that of any conventional logic, how the organic flow of first into second nature is a reworking of biological into social reality. Each phase or “moment,” pressed by its own internal logic into an antithetical and ultimately a more transcendent form, emerges as a more complex unity-in-diversity that encompasses its earlier moments even as it goes beyond them. Despite the imagery of strife that permeates the Hegelian version of this process, the ultimate point in the Hegelian Aufhebung is reconciliation, not the nihilism of pure negation. Moreover, norms — the actualization of the potential “is” into the ethical “ought” — are anchored in the objective reality of potentiality itself, not as it always “is,” to be sure, but as it “should be,” such that speculation becomes a valid account of reality in its truth. Hegel, I would argue, radically expanded the very concept of Being in philosophy and in the real world to encompass the potential and its actualization into the rational “what should be,” not only as an existential “what is.”

Dialectical speculation, despite Hegel’s own view of the retrospective function of philosophy, thus is projective in a sharply critical sense (quite unlike “futurology,” which dissolves the future by making it a mere extrapolation of the present). In its restless critique of reality we can call dialectic a “negative philosophy” — in contrast, I should add, to Adorno’s nihilism or “negative dialectics.” By the same token, speculation is creative in that it ceaselessly contrasts the free, rational, and moral actuality of “what could be,” which inheres in nature’s thrust toward self-reflexivity, with the existential reality of “what is.” Speculation can ask why (not only how) the real has become the irrational — indeed, the inhuman and anti-ecological — precisely because dialectic alone is capable of grounding an ecological ethics in the potential, that is, in its objective possibilities for the realization of reason and truth.

This objectivization of possibilities — of potentiality continuous with its yet unrealized actualization — is the ground for a genuinely objective ethics, as distinguished from an ethical relativism subject to the waywardness of the opinion poll. An ecological dialectic, in effect, opens the way to an ethics that is rooted in the objectivity of the potential, not in the commandments of a deity or in the eternality of a supramundane and transcendental “reality.” Hence, the “what should be” is not only objective, it forms the objective critique of the given reality....

Beyond First and Second Nature

We must try to bring the threads of our discussion together and examine the important implications dialectic has for ecological thinking. A “dialectical view of life” is a special form of process philosophy. Its emphasis is not on change alone but on development. It is eductive rather than merely deductive, mediated rather than merely processual, and cumulative rather than merely continuous. Its objectivity begins with the existence of the potential, not with the mere facticity of the real; hence its ethics seeks the “what should be” as a realm of objective possibilities. That “possibilities” are objective, albeit not in the sense of a simplistic materialism, is dialectically justified by the perception that potentiality and its latent possibilities form an existential continuum that constitutes the authentic world of truth — the world of the “what should be,” not simply the world of the “what is,” with all its incompleteness and falsehood.

From a dialectical viewpoint, a change in a given level of biotic, communal, or, for that matter, social organization consists not simply of the appearance of a new, possibly more complex ensemble of “feedback loops.” Rather, it consists of qualitatively new attributes, interrelationships, and degrees of subjectivity that express and radically condition the emergence of a new potentiality, opening a new realm of possibility with its own unique tendency — not a greater or lesser number of “fluctuations” and “rhythms.” Moreover, this new potentiality is itself the result of other actualizations of potentialities that, taken together historically and cumulatively, constitute a developmental continuum — not a bullet “shot from a pistol” that explodes into Being without a history of its own or a continuum of which it is part.

Dialectical logic is an immanent logic of process — an ontological logic, not only a logic of concepts, categories, and symbols. This logic is emergent, in the sense that one speaks of the “logic of events.” Considered in terms of its emphasis on differentiation, this logic is provocatively concrete in its relationship to abstract generalization — shence Hegel’s seemingly paradoxical expression “concrete universal.” Dialectic thereby overcomes Plato’s dualistic separation of exemplary ideas from the phenomenal world of imperfect “copies” — hence its ethical thrust is literally structured, cumulatively as well as sequentially, in the concrete. Emerging from this superb ensemble is a world that is always ethically problematical but also an ethics that is always objective, a recognition of selfhood and subjectivity that embodies nonhuman and human nature, and a development from metabolic self-maintenance to rational self-direction and innovation that locates the origins of reason within nature, not in a supramundane domain apart from nature. The social is thus wedded to the natural, and human reason is wedded to nonhuman subjectivity through processes that are richly mediated and graded in a shared continuum of development. This ecological interpretation of dialectic not only overcomes dualism but moves through differentiation away from reductionism.

Ecology cleanses the remarkable heritage of European organismic thought of the hard teleological predeterminations it acquired from Greek theology, the Platonistic denigration of physicality, and the Christian preoccupation with human inwardness as “soul” and a reverence for God. Only ecology can ventilate the dialectic as an orientation toward the objective world by rendering it coextensive with natural evolution, a possibility that arose in the last century with the appearance of evolutionary theory.

As such, an ecological dialectic is not solely a way of thinking organically; it can be a source of meaning to natural evolution — of ethical meaning, not only rational meaning. To state this idea more provocatively: we cannot hope to find humanity’s “place in nature” without knowing how it emerged from nature, with all its problems and possibilities. An ecological dialectic produces a creative paradox: second nature in an ecological society would be the actualization of first nature’s potentiality to achieve mind and truth. Human intellection in an ecological society would thus “fold back” upon the evolutionary continuum that exists in first nature. In this sense — and in this sense alone — second nature would thus become first nature rendered selfreflexive, a thinking nature that would know itself and could guide its own evolution, not an unthinking nature that “sought its own balance” through the “dynamics” of “fluctuations” and “feedback” that cause needless pain, suffering, and death. Although thought, society, and culture would retain their integrity, they would consciously express the abiding tendency within first nature to press itself toward the level of conscious self-directiveness.

In a very real sense, an ecological society would be a transcendence of both first nature and second nature into a new domain of a free nature, a nature that in a truly rational humanity reached the level of conceptual thought — in short, a nature that would willfully and thinkingly cope with conflict, contingency, waste, and compulsion. In this new synthesis, where first and second nature are melded into a free, rational, and ethical nature, neither first nor second would lose its specificity and integrity. Humanity, far from diminishing the integrity of nature, would add the dimension of freedom, reason, and ethics to it and raise evolution to a level of self-reflexivity that has always been latent in the emergence of the natural world....

If we understand that human beings are indeed moral agents because natural evolution confers upon them a clear responsibility toward the natural world, we cannot emphasize their unique attributes too strongly. For it is this unique ability to think conceptually and feel a deep empathy for the world of life that makes it possible for humanity to reverse the devastation it has inflicted on the biosphere and create a rational society. This implies not only that humanity, once it came into its own as the actualization of its potentialities, could be a rational expression of nature’s creativity and fecundity, but that human intervention into natural processes could be as creative as natural evolution itself.

This evolutionary and dialectical viewpoint, which derives the human species from nature as the embodiment of nature’s own thrust toward self-reflexivity, changes the entire argument around competing “rights” between human and nonhuman life-forms into an exploration of the ways in which human beings intervene into the biosphere. Whether humanity recognizes that an ecological society would be the fulfillment of a major tendency in natural evolution, or remains blind to its own humanity as a moral and ecological agent in nature, becomes a social problem that requires a social ecology. The self-effacing quietism and “spirituality” so rampant today afflict a sizable, highly privileged sector of Euro-American society — human types so consumed by a “love” of nature and life that they may well ignore the needless but very real suffering and pain that exist in nature and society alike.