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Principal Subjects of the World: Darwin's Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in Nature
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Subjects of the World Subjects of the World Darwin's Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in Nature Paul Sheldon Davies The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London P A U L S H E L D O N D A V I E S lives in Newport News, Virginia, with his wife and daughter. His first book, Norms of Nature: Naturalism and the Nature of Functions, was published in 2001. He teaches philosophy at the College of William and Mary. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13762-9 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-13762-7 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davies, Paul Sheldon. Subjects of the world : Darwin's rhetoric and the study of agency in nature / Paul Sheldon Davies. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13762-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-13762-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Teleology. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Evolution. 4. Agent (Philosophy) 5. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882—Literary style. I. Title. BD581.D25 2009 124—dc22 2008042033 b The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. F o r C a ss o n d r a C a i l i n My daughter Subject of the world More than imagination Can embrace Or bear to behold Contents Part One A Progressive Orientation: Naturalism as Exploration 1 The Vividness of Truth: Darwin's Romantic Rhetoric and the Evolutionary Framework 2 3 1 3 Our Most Vexing Problem: Conceptual Conservatism and Conceptual Imperialism 19 Naturalism as Exploration: The Elements of Reform 35 Part Two The Allure of Agency: 'Purpose' in Biology 53 4 The Real Heart of Darwinian Evolutionary Biology 55 5 A Formative Power of a Self-Propagating Kind: Natural Purpo; ses and the Concept Location Project 6 76 A Persistent Mode of Understanding: The Psychological Power of 'Purpose' 104 Part Three The Illusions of Agency: 'Free Will' and 'Moral Responsibility' 135 7 The Death of an Aphorism: The Psychology of Free Will 137 8 The Bare Possibility of Our Opinion: Libertarian Imperialism 170 9 Words Give Us a Special Ability: Compatibilist Conservatism 193 Appendix 227 Notes 229 References 243 Index 253 Appreciation and Acknowledgments 239 1 N A Progressive Orientation Naturalism as Exploration n N ONE The Vividness of Truth: Darwin's Romantic Rhetoric and the Evolutionary Framework A worthy naturalist, Humboldt thought, left no means "unemployed by which an animated picture of a distant zone, untraversed by ourselves, may be presented to the mind with all the vividness of truth, enabling us even to enjoy some portion of the pleasure derived from the immediate contact with nature." Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life Darwin's Rhetoric Charles Darwin was a shrewd rhetorician. The voice of On the Origin of Species has a conversational charm that is disarming and at times alluring. On occasion Darwin raises his pitch to sing the praises of living things in Romantically charged refrains. That too is rhetorically effective, for Darwin's defense of the theory of evolution by natural selection, while effectively strangling to death the argument from design, is expressed in tones that sometimes verge on reverence. The news that God is dead is put in the mouth not of a madman but of a man who retains at least some sensibilities of a traditional believer—a sensibility, above all, marked with an appreciation of the foibles and pretensions of human reason. C H A P T E R one The contrast with Friedrich Nietzsche's rhetoric in The Gay Science is indeed stark. Nietzsche's messenger personifies the eminent collapse of our theological worldview. His derangement embodies the coming cultural crash; he is meant to disturb us by being so disturbed himself. Darwin's messenger aims at the opposite. He deliberately sets out to minimize for us the felt sense of agitation by adopting a tone that is mostly casual and sometimes pastoral. Usually Darwin is chatting with us or with other naturalists of his day, though occasionally he breaks into Romantic song. The rhetorical strategy is to adopt a tone and cadences that engender both calm and optimism—calm from the charm of conversation, optimism from the Romantic imagery and rhythms. The crucial assumption is that a poetically expressed appreciation of nature is likely to engender a felt sense of optimism, along with gratitude and even hope. The most urgent hope is that our love of nature and life—our love for what we formerly conceived as "God's creation"—can outlive our dying belief in God. As a young naturalist, during his years aboard the HMS Beagle especially, Darwin was steeped in the works of Romantic naturalists, including Alexander von Humbolt. Far from proclaiming the death of our ancestral theological worldview, the German Romantics announce its transformation. God is no longer an external agent directing events from afar but is transmuted into something else, something suffusing all of reality. God is no longer outside the world; the world is now saturated with God. The font of life's fecundity, the wellspring of novelty and creative yearnings in nature, the mysterious inspiration of artistic souls—these are the embodiments of the Romantic God. For Humboldt, all of nature comprises a "harmoniously ordered whole"—he calls it the Cosmos—and the inspired soul not only grasps but becomes part of it. With echoes of Spinoza, Humboldt exclaims, "Everywhere the mind is penetrated by the same sense of grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe." Precisely this is why, for Humboldt, the worthy naturalist, when describing some distant land or foreign species, is obliged to employ every available device to "animate" the scene for his reader. Such devices enable the reader to experience—to have one's mind "penetrated by"—and thus participate in the harmonious order of all things. It is the responsibility of the Romantic naturalist, according to Humboldt, to be an effective conduit of Spinoza's God, of "the universality and reciprocal limitation and unity of all the vital forces in nature."1 And that is why, on the Romantic view, the imagery and the rhythms with which naturalists speak are as vital as the substance of their theo T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th ries; rhetoric serves a communicative function every bit as important as the propositions uttered. What I wish to suggest then is that we begin to appreciate Darwin's rhetorical insights by considering the question, What happens if we discard the theology latent in the Romantic view but retain the rhetorical strategies? Might we succeed in convincing those with theological instincts that the right view of life is decidedly nontheological? Might we make the evolutionary view of life palatable? Might we invite acceptance where Nietzsche's madman provokes resistance? Darwin's Insights Darwin's skill as a rhetorician does not diminish his accomplishments as a scientist. To the contrary, it confirms them, for his rhetorical insights are motivated by the general perspective provided by his view of life. Scientific inquiry is, of course, a form of human intercourse subject to nonrational as well as rational powers of persuasion and, as everyone knows, rhetorical devices are sometimes coercive and not merely persuasive. But beyond this truism there is the distinctively Darwinian point that we are evolved animals, products of earthly processes operating through long stretches in the history of this planet. And one thing we know in light of our animal history is that, like our close primate cousins and our more remote mammalian cousins, we are well equipped to anticipate and navigate our environment in ways that never reach conscious awareness or ways that rise to consciousness only after the fact. The architecture of our affective and low-level cognitive capacities is far more elaborate and pervasive than the architecture of our consciously accessible cognitive capacities. This makes plausible the suggestion that we, by virtue of our affective and cognitive capacities, are nonconscious but nevertheless vigilant surveyors and anticipators of the world. We sense threats before we become conscious of them; we are attracted to certain things before any conscious recognition of our desires; and so on. No wonder, then, the wisdom of the rhetorician. No wonder the care that Darwin, in crafting his public presentation, lavished upon the implicit, affective reactions that his theory was bound to provoke. It is as if Darwin asked himself, "What are the most entrenched habits of thought and most entrenched cognitive and affective dispositions likely to inhibit a correct understanding of my theory?" As I shall construe them, the relevant habits of thought include the conceptual categories and other sorts of lore bequeathed to us by our cultural ancestors. They are the central ingredients of our conceptual scheme to which we are C H A P T E R one habituated by way of education and enculturation. We begin to appreciate the power of these habits as we acquire knowledge of our cultural history. And I shall construe the relevant cognitive and affective dispositions as those features of our psychology that inhibit or otherwise retard our best efforts at inquiry. These are capacities of our minds that sometimes interfere with capacities that motivate and guide our inquiring activities. We come to appreciate the depth and breadth of these infirmities as we make progress in neuroscience, psychology, and sociology. Darwin knew that even his most educated peers would misunderstand him, so he sought to correct the habits or dispositions responsible for such errors. These are rhetorical strategies that add nothing of propositional content to the theory of evolution by natural selection; Darwin could have presented his view without them. But unless one's audience is responsive only to propositional contents—and that is not the kind of animal we are—a full and accurate presentation of one's theory must contain something more. It must include the resources to open up our affective and aesthetic sensibilities and the resources to bypass the biases of our psychological constitution. Darwin knew, after all, that he was offering a theory of life bound to disturb the worldview of nearly every educated person of his day. He knew he was offering theoretical dynamite to animals who, no matter the power of their intellect, are psychologically structured to detect and respond to threats even before they become consciously aware that they are being threatened. It is here, in the study of our history and our constitution, in identifying the habits of thought and dispositions of mind that lead us astray, that Darwin's rhetorical insights have their greatest impact. Darwin's conversational charm and his occasional Romantic flourish are important, to be sure, but they are the relatively superficial devices with which he applied these insights. The more substantive application is evident in some of the explicit arguments he offers throughout his discussion. And in this book, I propose to let the more substantive applications of Darwin's rhetorical insights come to the fore. I shall do this by describing the ill effects of our history and our constitution on our attempts to study ourselves and by developing a variety of strategies for diminishing or reversing the retarding effects that these habits and dispositions sometimes have. My hope is that the strategies I offer are ones Darwin would have embraced if today's knowledge had been available to him. If my account is compelling, we will have uncovered two important facts. First, the way that most contemporary theorists frame their intellectual tasks, especially those concerned with human nature, is in need of reform. It is a mistake to frame either our scientific or our philosophi T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th cal inquiries in terms of conceptual categories that perpetuate habits of thought or dispositions of mind that conflict with the conclusions of our best sciences. And, as we will see, this point applies with considerable force to contemporary theorists who see themselves as robust naturalists; some of our very best naturalists are not naturalistic enough. Second, if my suggestions are on track, we will have discovered an orientation toward inquiry that helps us internalize the truth of evolutionary theory. It accomplishes this by integrating evolutionary theory into the very methods with which we frame our inquiries. In the introduction to his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume expresses the intention of introducing the Newtonian methods of inquiry to the study of human nature. My intention is to do something analogous regarding Darwin's rhetorical insights. In good Humean fashion, we begin by trying to get a grip on the kind of inquirers we are—the historical and constitutional infirmities we bring to the table—and then formulating our intellectual tasks informed by that knowledge. Nietzsche observed that important advances in human knowledge have been driven by advances in our methods of inquiry. On my reading of Darwin, his application of rhetoric illustrates Nietzsche's claim to great effect. It thus seems a good bet to try to develop further the devices Darwin employed so we may apply Nietzsche's insight to the intellectual problems of our own day. Darwinian Strategies It is easy enough to identify the crucial strategies employed by Darwin in the Origin. A few representative passages culled mainly from the first edition are all we need. Begin with the strategy Darwin employs in the course of trying to convince his readers that evolution occurs by means of artificial selection among domestic species. This is the central thesis of chapter 1, "Variation under Domestication." In later chapters, Darwin argues that evolution occurs in analogous fashion by means of selection in natural settings, but even here, in the context of artificial selection, he anticipates resistance from breeders to the hypothesis that current species descend from strikingly different ancestral species. His key insight is to anticipate that the intuitions and expectations of most plant and animal breeders are calibrated to the creationist hypothesis so widely accepted in his day. The key thought is that, since evolutionary theory undermines creationism, we must guard against the biasing effects that our creationist intuitions or expectations will no doubt generate: C H A P T E R one One circumstance has struck me much; namely, that all the breeders of the various domestic animals and the cultivators of plants, with whom I have ever conversed, or whose treatises I have read, are firmly convinced that the several breeds to which each has attended, are descended from so many aboriginally distinct species [distinct species presumably created by god]. Ask, as I have asked, a celebrated raiser of Hereford cattle, whether his cattle might not have descended from long-horns, and he will laugh you to scorn. I have never met a pigeon, or poultry, or duck, or rabbit fancier, who was not fully convinced that each main breed was descended from a distinct species. (Darwin 1859, 28–29) Having identified a ubiquitous form of resistance to the hypothesis of evolution, he immediately works to diffuse it by pointing to specific failures of imagination within the breeders' psychological fabric. Darwin does not ridicule breeders but points to the habits of thought or the affective and cognitive dispositions of mind that limit and color what they are inclined to see. And he explicitly extends the lesson to the context of natural selection: The explanation, I think, is simple: from long-continued study they are strongly impressed with the differences between the several races; and though they well know that each race varies slightly, for they win their prizes by selecting such slight differences, yet they ignore all general arguments, and refuse to sum up in their minds slight differences accumulated during many successive generations. May not those naturalists who, knowing far less of the laws of inheritance than does the breeder, and knowing no more than he does of the intermediate links in the long lines of descent, yet admit that many of our domestic races have descended from the same parents—may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of species in a state of nature being lineal descendents of other species? (Darwin 1859, 34) These may seem more or less pedestrian observations, but I think I can convince you otherwise. The suggestions that Darwin offers here and repeats in the concluding chapter of the Origin are, in my view, of considerable importance to a fruitful orientation toward inquiry. So let us have a closer look. I think it is fair on interpretive grounds to say that here Darwin is offering two psychological speculations. I think it is also fair to read into both speculations an appeal to two basic elements, namely, biologically inherited dispositions of mind and culturally inherited habits of thought. The first speculation is that breeders are perceptually and affectively attuned to what is distinctive about their preferred breeds; and they feel that there is something unique to their own broods. This is a claim about the natural T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th psychological dispositions of people who breed plants or animals. After all, you are hardly likely to engage in such activities without a prior love or at least curiosity for the organisms in your care. Something about these organisms—their potential for brightening your financial prospects, if nothing else—attracts and holds your interest and affections; if not, the requisite expenditures of time and money would surely drive you away. And, since something about the organisms predisposes you toward them, it is highly likely that these prior dispositions are reinforced through long hours of caregiving. Your ongoing cultivation only deepens your attachments, as gardeners and pet lovers will readily attest. There is also a cultural element to this speculation, namely, that we are inclined to interpret our deeply felt attachments in culturally inherited terms, including some inherited concepts that conflict with evolutionary theory. We feel an attachment to Hereford, not to longhorns, and this fact engenders confidence that the difference cannot be one of degree. Yet part of the cause of our confidence is an antecedent sympathy toward the creationist view of the origins of life. Our feelings only serve to confirm what we are already inclined to believe, namely, that each species must have been uniquely crafted from above. Of course an atheist may, by temperament and years of caregiving, come to experience the same sense of uniqueness toward his preferred plants or animals, but a culturally sustained commitment to a creationist theology would surely accentuate the feeling. So both elements—the psychological dispositions and the habits of thought—help explain why breeders resist the suggestion that their preferred breeds are nothing more than well-marked varieties of some ancestral breed. The further speculation is that, as the activity of breeding heightens our propensity to see our preferred organisms as unique, it simultaneously diminishes any inclination we might have toward adopting a deeply historical perspective on living things. We grow blind to the enormous power of small changes over thousands of generations; we refuse or simply do not think to "sum up" in our mind all the slight changes in traits accumulated over hundreds or thousands of successive generations. We fail, that is, to cultivate a historical imagination; we are taken in by the present moment because we are gripped with a felt sense of the uniqueness of this kind of organism. This failure is clearly encouraged by theologically based, culturally inherited habits of thought. Those who see the world through creationist eyes—those who assume that each species is a product of a special act of creation—feel no compulsion or encouragement to investigate the enormous formative powers of history. Why would they? On their view, the formative powers attributed to God C H A P T E R one are infinite, and the course of history on earth, no matter its duration, is impotent to alter what has been fixed by an infinite God. These culturally inherited habits of thought are not the whole story, for Darwin apparently thought that the failure of historical imagination is a consequence, at least in part, of a failure to cultivate a sufficiently robust psychological imagination or, at minimum, a failure to employ our powers of reason to compensate for a limited psychological imagination. Consider once again the failure among breeders to sum up in their minds the accumulated effects of artificial selection. The problem here is twofold. There is the failure of the imagination to hold in a single embrace the alterations wrought over great stretches of time. But there is also the failure to notice in oneself this first failure of imagination, and this double-layered failure is what I am calling a failure of psychological imagination. The failure of psychological imagination is quite general in scope. Indeed, the problem identified by Darwin in the reasoning of breeders is but one type of conflict engendered by the very constitution of our psychology. Constitutional conflicts, as I shall call them, are conflicts that arise when functionally distinct capacities of our minds are not in sync, when the outputs of one conflict with those of another. Darwin's appreciation of such conflicts is clearly on display in the well-known section of chapter VI, "Difficulties on Theory," where he responds to the objection that the theory of evolution by natural selection cannot account for "organs of extreme perfection": To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. (Darwin 1859, 186–87; my italics) Darwin is insistent that although the argument from design has undeniable intuitive power, its power diminishes as we identify and correct both failures of imagination. Of particular interest is the claim in the final sentence concerning the contrast between reason and imagination. Our 10 T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th psychology, he claims, comprises different capacities that do not always operate in harmony and that sometimes conflict even in the course of scientific theorizing. The conflict in this case is not a simple clash between imagination and reason. The problem is that, first, our imaginations are limited in ways that our capacity for rational reflection is not and, second, we are typically oblivious to this crucial difference between imagination and reason. We tend not to notice that the felt confidence with which we assert that Hereford could not be descended from longhorns is a product of a relatively limited cognitive capacity. Furthermore, we tend not to notice the change in perspective wrought by the persistent application of reason to available evidence. As we will see in later chapters, the most potent causal factor in our failures of psychological imagination is the pervasive effects of our nonconscious cognitive and affective capacities. We have only the sparest knowledge of what is going on in our own psychologies because reliable, conscious access to our own capacities is paltry. This is a central theme to which I shall return repeatedly. The second most potent causal factor is that we are blissfully unaware of just how unaware we are. This too is a point to which I will repeatedly return. And it appears to be an effect of our naive realism, our deep-seated sense that our perceptions of the world are direct and unbiased.2 We thus are doubly vexed: a great deal of our mental lives occurs below the level of conscious awareness and, at the same time, we feel a false sense of confidence that all, most, or at least some of the really important parts of our mental lives are accessible to conscious awareness. Although the evidence for both these causal factors has been discovered only in recent years, I suspect that Darwin, had he known such evidence, would not have been overly surprised. Indeed, that he was alive to such conflicts is particularly evident in his quoting with approval the following comments from Helmholtz concerning the "incongruities"—indeed, the "contradictions"—in the very structure of our perceptual capacities, including the workings of our eyes! Helmholtz says, "That which we have discovered in the way of inexactness and imperfection in the optical machine and in the image on the retina, is as nothing in comparison with the incongruities which we have just come across in the domain of the sensations. One might say that nature has taken delight in accumulating contradictions in order to remove all foundations from the theory of a pre-existing harmony between the external and internal worlds" (quoted in Darwin 1872b, 163). The fact that Darwin explicitly endorses Helmholtz's view should grab our attention. For Helmholtz is adamant that the human mind is so riddled with contradictions—with accumulated constitutional 11 C H A P T E R one conflicts—that it is no longer possible to seriously entertain the hypothesis that our immediate thoughts and feelings provide us with an accurate portrayal of the world. Darwin, it seems, is committed to the point about constitutional conflicts in no uncertain terms. To the extent we tend not to notice the accumulated contradictions in ourselves, we thereby fail to cultivate a psychological imagination. We ignore all general arguments and fail to sum up in our minds the range of conflicts likely to emerge from our very constitution. This failure of psychological imagination, as I have said, helps sustain our lack of historical imagination. One rather striking way it does this is by encouraging us to feel that the theory of evolution by natural selection is indeed too limited to account for organs of extreme perfection. Here is how it works. We first behold the marvelous subtlety and complexity of the mammalian eye; this is a bit of reflection that is decidedly ahistorical. We then consider whether something so exquisite could have arisen out of the undirected or random causal-mechanical factors involved in natural selection; we ask ourselves this question without the painstaking employment of our reason that Darwin describes in response to this objection. And then, because we have failed to sum up the accumulated effects of long stretches of history, our aesthetic response to the dumb mechanisms of selection is no match for our felt appreciation of the apparent purposiveness with which the eye functions. We sense that the mechanisms of selection, no matter the length of time, are too paltry and stupid to ever produce something so clearly marked by intelligence and design. Thus we come to feel an undeniable gap between theory and our alleged observation. No wonder we find ourselves in a state of disbelief regarding evolutionary theory—such is the retarding power of an undeveloped psychological imagination. And when we turn to Darwin's discussion of the struggle for existence, his appeal to the retarding effects of conflicts within our constitution is given full reign. The appeal to the failure of psychological imagination, to the distorting effects of our affective and cognitive dispositions, is impossible to miss: "We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year" (Darwin 1859, 62). 12 T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th This passage from chapter 3, "The Struggle for Existence," comes immediately after a dire warning that the nature of life will be misunderstood if we fail to recognize the enormous violence and death involved in the relentless creation of new life: "Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood" (Darwin 1859, 62). The universal struggle for life results from the fact that all living things are driven to reproduce at a rate that much exceeds mere replacement. Since nearly all of life is so driven, since renewable resources required for life are finite, and since the more or less constant conditions of life are sometimes lethal, destruction due to various forms of competition is inevitable. The relentless drive to produce more life in a world of finite resources and hostile conditions is, of necessity, a deeply destructive drive. Although our culturally inherited habits of thought no doubt play a role here, our affective dispositions are most salient. Darwin is surely right that an intellectual grasp of the struggle for existence is relatively easy and that having a stomach for the actual facts involved is much harder. This is to highlight a powerful failure of psychological imagination. We grasp the struggle for existence at a level of comprehension relatively detached from our affective or visceral reactions; our capacity for reason processes the proposition without our imagination processing the brutal facts of the matter. So the failure of psychological imagination is twofold. There is a failure of integration between comprehension and imagination, and there is a failure to notice the failure of integration. The net result is that, because of such conflicts in the constitution of our psychology, much of the time we are oblivious to the mismatch between our capacities. The real challenge then is to cultivate a more robust psychological imagination. The challenge in this case, in fully understanding "the whole economy of nature," is to internalize the destructiveness of life by "engraining" it in our minds. The challenge is to calibrate our intuitions, our aesthetic reactions, and our expectations in light of the struggle for existence. Unless we develop the habit of not merely seeing but also feeling all of life as pervasively destructive, we will continue to approach living things with hunches and gut feelings that limit or distort what we see. A failure of psychological imagination will lead us astray. We will fail to grasp the nature of living things. 13 C H A P T E R one The Source of Darwin's Strategies: The Romantic Naturalists? The influence of the Romantic naturalists on Darwin is the topic of a wonderful recent discussion by Robert Richards. In The Romantic Conception of Life, Richards traces the development of biological theorizing from the early Romantic period in Germany, beginning with the works and lives of the brothers Schlegel (Friedrich and Wilhelm), Fichte, Schleiermacher, and others through those of Schiller, Schelling, von Humboldt, and Goethe. The book concludes with an extended epilogue in which Richards argues that key elements of the Romantic view of life are retained in Darwin's own theorizing and, in consequence, that we misunderstand the core content of Darwin's theory when we try—as most contemporary theorists try—to conceptualize evolutionary theory without a prior commitment to an antecedent, form-giving archetype that underwrites the unity of forms we observe in large classes of organisms. He says, "In this epilogue I will try to demonstrate that the usual interpretation of Darwinian nature is quite mistaken, that Darwin's conception of nature derived, via various channels, in significant measure from the German Romantic movement, and that, consequently, his theory functioned not to suck values out of nature but to recover them for a de-theologized nature. I will indicate how his Romantic assumptions led him to portray nature as organic, as opposed to mechanistic, and to identify God with nature, or at least to reanimate nature with the soul of the recently departed deity" (Richards 2002, 516). A couple of pages later he says, "When Darwin abandoned the Creator God, he did not, as I will argue, eviscerate living nature of teleological structure; rather his nature had exactly the same Romantic outlook as that depicted by thinkers like Alexander von Humboldt. And creative power would be transferred to nature in the gradual, evolutionary unfolding of telic purpose" (Richards 2002, 518). This is a remarkable thesis. If Richards is right, virtually all contemporary interpreters, myself included, are mistaken in attributing to Darwin a blindly mechanistic view of natural selection. But is Richards right? In particular, is it correct to interpret the perpetuation of Romantic metaphors as evidence that Darwin conceived of natural selection not in mechanistic terms but rather in terms of an unfolding, cosmic, telic purpose? Or is it perhaps more plausible to read the Romantic swells of Darwin's voice as evidence that he was indeed the shrewd rhetorician I have been trying to portray? I cannot pretend to settle the issue here. Doing so would require close examination of far more passages from Darwin's mature works than those considered by Richards.3 Nonetheless, the contrast between my 14 T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th view of Darwin as rhetorician and Richards's view of Darwin as Romantic is helpful in this respect. Richards is surely right to insist that any adequate interpretation of Darwin must explain the persistence of the Romantically charged language. It is simply implausible to think that the metaphors, cadences, and tone of the Origin were accidental. It is also true that, early in his intellectual development, and especially during and in the immediate aftermath of his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, Darwin fell under the spell of Humboldt's poetic descriptions of nature, based on Humboldt's own voyage a few years earlier. And, as Richards insists, it rings false to think that these powerful Romantic influences during Darwin's formative years were washed out of his intellectual orientation with no remaining traces. If, then, you are convinced (as I am) that Darwin's vision of evolution by natural selection is not of a piece with Romantic theology, then the burden rests on us to explain the obvious Romantic refrains in his voice. And this makes the view of Darwin as rhetorician look especially attractive. My grounds for doubting Richards's main thesis are the following. During his years aboard the HMS Beagle and the years leading up to the publication of the Origin, Darwin's view was under construction. His theory of the diversity and adaptedness of living forms was slowly taking shape. It thus is hardly surprising, given his immersion in the works of Humboldt, Goethe, and others, to find him struggling to work out his ideas within the framework at his disposal. Indeed, Richards's case is strongest when discussing Darwin's letters, notebooks, and books from the 1830s all the way up to the publication of the Origin in 1859. By contrast, when Richards turns to passages from the Origin and especially passages from the Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872a), the case is weaker. The Romantic metaphors and cadences have not disappeared altogether, to be sure, but they have diminished in number and exuberance. More importantly, we do not find in Darwin's later writings the explicit endorsement, as we do in the earlier sources cited by Richards, of the core theoretical substance of the views embraced by Humboldt and Goethe. To the contrary, we find clear assertions that appear to entail the denial of the Romantic conception of life. Thus, for instance, where Goethe posits a form-giving archetype—an antecedently existing template for all living types—we find Darwin insisting on the formative powers of descent with modifications over great stretches of history: "On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of descent" (Darwin 1859, 206; my italics). Darwin's explanation for the origins and perpetuation of discernible living forms appeals not to an antecedently existing form-giving source 15 C H A P T E R one but simply to the effects of "slight differences accumulated over many successive generations." Descent with modifications is the wellspring of all the forms that have emerged and evolved. Those that exist today, like those that existed before, are combinations that have taken hold. They are accidental forms preserved for a while by natural selection. They are also vulnerable forms, the products of causal factors scattered across space and time, readily altered or extinguished by changes in any number of contingent states of affairs. It seems to me, in fact, that at least some of Darwin's rhetorical strategies work precisely against Richards's thesis. This is evident in so far as Darwin's strategies are opposed to two failures of imagination within the Romantic view. There is, first of all, a failure of historical imagination like that of the Hereford breeder. Part of Goethe's scientific genius was discerning morphological similarities across organisms in very large classes4—Goethe is, according to Richards, the inventor of the study of morphology—and these early discoveries in morphology were wellknown to Darwin. But discerning such similarities across so many forms of life is one thing; explaining them is another matter. And as I have already pointed out, while Darwin's explanation is historical all the way down, Goethe's is not. Goethe certainly believed that his postulated archetype was perpetuated over generations, but, unlike Darwin, he did not give a historical explanation for the emergence of the archetype. To the contrary, for Goethe, the archetype had to exist antecedently in order to explain the evolution of life. By contrast, for Darwin, the mechanisms involved in the evolution of life explain the emergence of more or less distinct types. And this contrast vividly illustrates the extent to which Goethe and others underestimated the form-giving powers of accumulated changes over thousands or millions of generations. That is the first failure of imagination in the Romantic view. The second failure runs in the opposite direction. The problem is not a failure to compensate for an impoverished historical imagination but rather the unchecked glorification of our aesthetic capacities, including our creative imagination. Consider for a moment the Romantic naturalist who believes that artistic insight is integral in discovering the (presumed) unity of all life. She is presented with the patterns of similarity discerned by Goethe. What does she do? Instead of cultivating the capacities of reason to compensate for an impoverished historical imagination—instead of following the route recommended by Darwin—she lets loose her powers of imagination. After all, although she readily discerns the patterns of similarity through observation, she cannot observe the correct explanation of those patterns. To borrow from Humboldt, the correct ex16 T he V i v i d ne s s o f T r u th planation belongs to a "distant zone" that we cannot travel. So we must compensate. We must "animate" that distant zone in our imagination so as to grasp the correct explanation with all the "vividness of truth." Yet, as Darwin insists, overly zealous imaginations seduce us away from the truth as surely as impotent imaginations. The Romantics are right that our knowledge of the truth ought to be viscerally alive—we should feel as well as believe—but vivacity alone must not become our criterion of truth. That, presumably, is why organs of extreme perfection appear an obvious counterexample to Darwin, but it is also why, in reply, Darwin urges that we check our imaginations by summing up in our minds the cumulative effects of small changes wrought over thousands or millions of generations.5 As the power and reach of our historical imagination expand, the allure of the Romantic imagination, and with it the Romantic archetype, withers and dies. I do not claim that these considerations are sufficient to settle the difference between Richards and me. Nor am I particularly concerned to resolve the issue in either direction. I am content to acknowledge the importance of Darwin's relationship to his Romantic predecessors and offer the hypothesis that the Romantic strains in his voice are best construed as evidence of his rhetorical insights. After all, although I do not agree with Richards, our views are nonetheless compatible. That is, if he were right that Darwin's metaphors reflect the substance of his view and not merely a rhetorical strategy, then, in addition to learning something terribly surprising about one of our greatest scientists, we would conclude that Darwin is indeed in the business of trying to help his readers see and feel his theory aright. We would not regard Darwin's use of these devices as a rhetorical ploy, of course, since bursts of effusive poetry are integral to a Romantic orientation. But sincerity does not make an effective rhetorical device any less rhetorical or effective. So even if the central tenets of Darwin's theory commit him to the metaphysics of the German Romantics, there is something of value to take from Darwin's mode of discourse. The aim of this book is to do just that. Conclusion There are, then, two deficits of the imagination that inhibit our attempts at understanding the theory of evolution by natural selection. Our overall orientation toward the world tends to be ahistorical; we tend not to notice the biasing effects of our cultural ancestry. That is the first deficit. And our lack of a historical sense reinforces and is reinforced by a range 17 C H A P T E R one of biases to which we are naturally inclined, thanks to the architecture of our cognitive and affective capacities, including the tendency not to notice conflicts within our minds. That is the second deficit. Darwin was alive to these deficits throughout the whole of the Origin as illustrated in the passages above. It is precisely this Romantically inspired sensitivity to our habits of thought and dispositions of mind that helped make Darwin so shrewd a rhetorician without being a Romantic. Darwin's rhetorical insights have not lost their value. They have, however, been insufficiently appreciated among philosophers and psychologists of scientific inquiry. My aim is to develop and extend his insights in ways that he would have appreciated, in light of what is currently known about our history and our neurological and psychological constitution. We can, if I am right, flesh out in some detail the failures of imagination to which Darwin draws our attention and, in so doing, begin the task of describing a naturalistic orientation toward inquiry that stands some chance of correcting the habits and dispositions that thwart our pursuit of knowledge. The most vivid way to develop the power of Darwin's insights is to apply them to topics about which we are most likely led astray by our history and constitution. Perhaps there are several topics that fit this bill, but among the problems that have vexed our predecessors and continue to vex us the most is ourselves. Accordingly, my lead question, to which I now turn, concerns the nature of being human. It is this: What are we? 18 n N TWO Our Most Vexing Problem: Conceptual Conservatism and Conceptual Imperialism Man has always been his own most vexing problem. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man Niebuhr's answer to my lead question—What are we?—is that we are our own most vexing problem. And that is surely right. Nevertheless, Niebuhr's characterization of the nature of our vexation could hardly be further from the truth, and it is instructive to see where he goes wrong. The root cause of Niebuhr's error, I will argue, is that he suffers from the failures of imagination diagnosed by Darwin. Of course, Niebuhr is hardly unique in this regard. I have made him my first foil because he is an articulate and particularly learned representative of the types of failures that retard or otherwise minimize a naturalistic view of ourselves. Nor has Niebuhr's error been eradicated among serious inquirers of our day. As I argue in later chapters, his error is perpetuated in the works of some of our most visible theorists, many with expressed commitments to naturalism. To make my case against Niebuhr, I address issues at two levels of inquiry. One level concerns the substance of human agency and addresses my lead question directly; the other concerns methods of inquiry best suited for discovering the nature of human agency. I proceed this way because I see no plausible alternative. The best methods for discovering the truth about ourselves are methods framed, at least 19 C H A P T E R two in part, by Darwin's rhetorical insights. Our methods of inquiry ought to be informed by what we already know or rationally believe about ourselves, especially the limitations and illusions we bring to the task. We should feel impatience toward methods uninformed by such knowledge. At the same time, our best theories about ourselves are only as fruitful as the methods with which they were generated and sustained. Theories of human nature, including theories in neuroscience and psychology, must be informed and constrained by what we already know of the fecundity of various methods or strategies of inquiry. It is hard to see how to make progress on questions of substance without simultaneously addressing questions of method. About that, Nietzsche was surely right. It goes without saying that there may be better approaches to the study of human agency. The shortcomings in my approach may be too much. Still, every attempt at serious inquiry begins with a bet: which horses are likely to cross the finish line at all and which one is likely to cross first? In this regard, it is crucial to observe that our present-day understanding of human agency is at a critical crossroads. Though we do not know with high confidence what kind of agents we are, we do know with overwhelming confidence what kind of agents we are not. We know in light of our history and in light of discoveries concerning our constitution that we are not the kind of agents that our Enlightenment and Romantic predecessors took us to be. We also know that the way forward cannot be a simple matter of accumulating more information, for our methods are in need of reform. Today we are learning at a rapid pace how the effects of our history and our constitution bias or blind our view of ourselves, and some of the relevant discoveries are canvassed throughout my discussion. It is in light of these discoveries that the prospects for further knowledge of human nature appear far greater, in part by developing methodological strategies for diminishing the tendencies in ourselves that bias and blind us. And that, once again, is why we cannot help but focus our efforts on the messy back-and-forth between method and substance. Niebuhr's Antinomies To focus discussion, I begin with a few thoughts from one of the great theologians and cultural historians of the twentieth century. Although it may appear disingenuous or hyperbolic to begin a book on naturalism and agency with an excursion into theology, I intend to convince you 20 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em otherwise. For among the various orientations toward inquiry currently in fashion, including those that boast of naturalistic credentials, nearly all are informed by more than just a little theology. Once this becomes clear, we will be well positioned to see how to extend and apply Darwin's rhetorical insights. Niebuhr begins his magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, with the declaration that serves as epigraph to this chapter. He continues, "How shall he [the human agent] think of himself? Every affirmation which he may make about his stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analyzed. The analysis reveals some presupposition or implication which seems to deny what the proposition intended to affirm" (Niebuhr 1942, 1). Human nature, according to Niebuhr, is conflicted. The conflict is that although we belong to the natural order—the human being, he says, is "a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses" (Niebuhr 1942, 3)—we are also above or beyond or outside the natural. Naturalists are right to insist that we are part of the animal kingdom, but they err in thinking that the facts of our animal nature suffice to explain the full range of human capacities: . . . man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world. This latter fact is appreciated in one or the other of its aspects by various philosophies. But it is not frequently appreciated in its total import. That man stands outside of nature in some sense is admitted even by naturalists who are intent upon keeping him as close to nature as possible. They must at least admit that he is homo farber, a tool-making animal. That man stands outside the world is admitted by rationalists who, with Aristotle, define man as a rational animal and interpret reason as the capacity for making general concepts. But the rationalists do not always understand that man's capacity involves a further ability to stand outside himself, a capacity for self-transcendence, the ability to make himself his own object, a quality of spirit which is usually not fully comprehended or connoted in "ratio" or "nous" or "reason" or any other concepts which philosophers usually use to describe the uniqueness of man. (Niebuhr 1942, 3–4) No philosophical theory, not even the most extravagant rationalism, does justice to the human capacity for self-transcendence, a capacity beyond mere reason. What has vexed our predecessors and what vexes us is the apparent impossibility of integrating this remarkable capacity with our status as "children of nature." Every attempt at integration has fallen prey to internal conflicts, to what Niebuhr calls irresolvable antinomies, and precisely this is the source of our most vexing problem. Or so he says. 21 C H A P T E R two But we should wonder. Niebuhr asserts that we are endowed with the capacity to (1) take ourselves as objects of reflection or inquiry, (2) stand outside ourselves, (3) transcend ourselves, and (4) exercise a quality of spirit that is distinct in some way from reason. And he says this with confidence, as if it is all so obvious and clear. The only obvious point, however, is that Niebuhr's claims are far from clear. We are left to wonder, in the first place, what on earth he might be talking about, since none of the terms in 1–4 is explicated. It is also hard to know what evidence he might offer that should move the naturalist or even the nonnaturalist. After all, everyone can grant that humans are tool makers and tool users without granting that we are outside nature, since being unique in nature hardly entails being outside it. (There is, of course, the further point that it is empirically false that humans are the only tool-making or tool-using species on earth.) The naturalist can also agree that we have the capacity to take ourselves as objects of thought, since there is nothing nonnatural or supernatural in conceptualizing ourselves or some part of ourselves in the same way we conceptualize other objects of thought. But perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Niebuhr's claim is simply the overweening confidence with which he tosses off the assertion that we are self-transcending "spirits." Whence his confidence that it is part of our nature to transcend the natural by ascending to something above nature? This is not a trifling question, since the answer takes us to the heart of Niebuhr's overall orientation toward inquiry. The confidence with which he describes the antinomies in our nature stems not from his instincts as a critic or historian of culture but rather from his orientation as a theologian. To see that this is so, consider the naive question, What is the goal of theological reflection? I am not asking about the goals of religious rituals such as confession or prayer or communion, or the psychological and social functions of religious attitudes or states of mind such as reverence or guilt or contrition. I am asking instead about discourses by highly learned minds set forth in lectures and books, discourses that assert and appear to defend claims concerning the nature and even the destiny of human beings. The theological tradition to which Niebuhr belongs is in the business of seeking and disseminating grand truths about human nature. So the question to ask is, If Niebuhr's account of our most vexing problem belongs to a tradition of trying to discern the truth, why does his most crucial assertion concerning our nature stand so naked on the page, so unadorned by evidence? The answer rests precisely on the general orientation at the heart of Niebuhr's methods of inquiry and, indeed, at the heart of all theological inquiry. It rests on the default assumption that, with respect to the 22 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em most central features of being human, we begin the process of inquiry already knowing what we are like. The default is that we come to the activity of inquiry already knowing that some of the properties in terms of which we appear to conceptualize ourselves—'self-transcendence,' 'free will,' 'responsibility,' and so on—are constitutive of the kinds of beings we are. We know not only that these concepts are constitutive but also what these concepts dictate, that is, what our constitution must be like for these concepts to apply. The assumption is that we already know, for instance, that self-transcendence is indeed a defining property of being human and, moreover, that this property places us outside the natural order. According to this orientation, any theory that alters or fails to account for the concepts that we know to be constitutive of human nature is simply not a theory of us. It is, at best, a theory of something other than human nature. A commitment to this general orientation—that we already know, in advance of inquiry and at least in outline, what a successful theory of human nature must look like—explains the confidence with which Niebuhr insists that we are a conflicted mix of nature and something other than nature. The default assumption at the heart of theological reflection has, moreover, a direct analog in most contemporary philosophical reflection. The analogy can best be seen by considering the basic aims of philosophical reflection. As most of us practice it today, the goal of our reflections is to identify concepts of apparent importance, especially concepts such as 'freedom,' 'responsibility,' 'goodness,' 'consciousness,' and so on that bear on the nature of being human and then to locate these concepts amid the concepts and claims of our best developed sciences. This is to engage in what I will call the concept location project. The aim is to integrate our humanistic self-understanding with our emerging and evolving scientific view of the world. This, no doubt, has been one of the most pressing intellectual tasks since the rise of modern science, but in pursuing this project today, most philosophers, like the theologians, tend to endorse the default assumption described above. When we are the topic of our reflections—when the task is to understand the nature of being human—we tend to assume that we already know, in advance of scientific inquiry and at least in outline, what we are like. We tend to assume that the concepts of freedom, responsibility, goodness, and so on that we bring to the table are constitutive of what we are and that we already know or can readily discern what we must be like in order for these concepts to apply to us. The central target of my discussion then is the default assumption of all theological and most philosophical reflection, and, as I have 23 C H A P T E R two indicated, we will discover that some of our most naturalistically inclined theorists nevertheless fall back upon this assumption at crucial points in their reflections. The constructive aim of my discussion is to suggest strategies for finally eradicating the residual theology that retards the progress of human knowledge. Of course, most theorists who are overtly nonnaturalistic nonetheless tip their hats to the astonishing growth in human knowledge since the rise of modern science. But they do so in a defensive posture, and their strategy always rests upon the same ploy. In one form or another they strive to minimize the unmatched power of scientific methods by subordinating those methods to the default assumption just described. The scientific pursuit of knowledge is constrained by or beholden to the authority of concepts that appear to play an especially important role within our worldview. This orientation, as I say, is at the heart of all theological and a good deal of philosophical discourse. To help fix our ideas, then, I am going to describe two general orientations toward inquiry within the contemporary intellectual landscape (I describe a third in a later section). Both rest upon the presumption that, with respect to important features of human nature, we already know what we are like. I then return to Niebuhr's view of self-transcendence, for we may, armed with both orientations, appreciate how starkly the theologian's orientation, as well as the philosopher's concept location project, contrasts with a robust naturalistic orientation. Two Orientations Toward Inquiry The first orientation, what I call conceptual conservatism, comes in two distinct species. These include 1. the commitment to preserve as far as possible any concept that appears important within some well-developed scientific theory 2. the commitment to preserve as far as possible any concept that appears important within our general worldview Niebuhr illustrates the commitment to the second orientation with respect to 'self-transcendence' and, more generally, 'human agency' as these concepts function in our cultural worldview.1 Indeed, Niebuhr belongs to a tradition in which the long genealogy of any concept in our worldview is taken as powerful evidence of its importance. The longer the historical roots, the more likely a given concept designates something of 24 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em substance—or so it is assumed; and the greater the appearance of substance, the more pressing that the concept be "located" and thereby preserved. Concepts with the longest roots are those that must be retained by reconciling them with emerging scientific knowledge. The perpetual task of theology, given this orientation, is to preserve our most venerable concepts by continually integrating and reintegrating them with everything else we believe to be true of the world. And concepts concerning the nature of human agency are, as a matter of historical fact, among the most venerated. The fixation in Niebuhr (and, as we will see, in several self-avowed naturalists) on the long, persistent history of a concept may appear a sensible way to proceed. Longevity, it may be thought, is evidence that the relevant concept is tracking something important and real. The problem with conceptual conservatism, however, is not a simple-minded distrust of concepts with long ancestral roots. The problem is more specific. Conservatism is objectionable with respect to what I call dubious concepts. One category of dubious concepts comprises concepts that descend to us from a worldview we no longer regard as true. A concept is dubious by descent if, for example, its genealogy traces back to the theological worldview of our Romantic and Enlightenment ancestors—a view we no longer regard as true or promising—and if the concept has not been vindicated in any well-confirmed scientific theory. This is not to assume that all theological claims are false, only that none has shown itself relevant to the enormous progress in knowledge since the rise of modern science. The steady, increasing irrelevance of theological concepts and claims to progress in inquiry is, I take it, as near a brute fact as we are likely to get in the study of history. It thus is rational to frame our intellectual problems and solutions in terms that leave out or neutralize concepts dubious by descent. Precisely this, I suggest, is behind Darwin's concern to identify and minimize the effects of certain culturally inherited habits of thought. There is, moreover, a second category of dubious concepts, namely, concepts dubious by psychological role. Some of our most basic conceptualizing capacities lead us astray. Our tendency to overapply the perceptual concept 'face'—to clouds, automobile grilles, abstract paintings, and so on—is a vivid illustration. But there are other, more substantive cases. Several contemporary psychologists hypothesize that the human mind comprises at least two ensembles of conceptualizing capacities, one concerned with causal relations, the other with mental states. Our cognitive and affective capacities, it is claimed, are structurally disposed to apply the concept 'cause' under a range of perceptual conditions, several of which involve nothing more than the mistaken appearance of a causal 25 C H A P T E R two relation. We are also structurally disposed to apply a host of mentalistic concepts, including 'intention' and 'belief,' even when the attributed mental state does not exist. Or so it is claimed.2 And concepts for which our conceptualizing capacities are like this—apt to generate false positives—are dubious by psychological role. This, I suggest, is behind Darwin's concern to identify and minimize the effects of certain inherited dispositions of mind. The problem with conceptual conservatism then, as we will see throughout this book, arises with respect to concepts dubious by descent, by psychological role, or by both. The second orientation toward inquiry is what I call conceptual imperialism, namely, a commitment to the view that certain concepts have a right among and dominion over all other concepts and all methods of inquiry. This is not a commitment to saving as far as possible the relevant concepts, since the question of altering or eliminating certain concepts has been closed off from all discussion. Instead, the task is to reflect upon the content of such concepts and, on the basis of such reflections, describe what the world must be like for it to fall under such concepts. The assumption is that we already know, at least with respect to certain concepts, everything we need to know for their correct application; the only question is whether the actual world fits the properties specified by the content of the concepts. Lest anyone suspect me of caricature in the case of imperialism, consider the imperialist's orientation toward the concept 'free will.' The im perialist presumes that some apparently important concepts are necessary in some sense and hence nonnegotiable, at least at their core. The claim concerning 'free will' is that if we alter or relinquish our traditional concept we thereby lose our grip on a host of concepts associated with the notions of control and responsibility. Altering or eliminating those concepts eviscerates our conceptual scheme to such an extent that we can no longer think or offer meaningful assertions about human agency. We will have changed the subject and lost our way. From the imperialist's point of view, there is something inherently self-destructive about a form of inquiry in which a concept so near the core can be altered or eliminated. What, then, is the positive aim of imperialist inquiry concerning free will? The aim is to reflect on our concept by way of thought experiments and articulate conditions necessary and sufficient for its application. Once we have accomplished that, we may then specify what the world must be like for something actually to fall under the concept. On the imperialist assumption that our concept must be retained, and on the basis of conditions deemed necessary and sufficient, we are forced to conclude, as Roderick Chisholm (1964) does for example, that human beings must 26 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em be akin to God with respect to the will. The imperialist claims in this case to have discovered that the core of the human self must include the capacity to initiate causal sequences leading to free actions without that capacity itself being subject to efficient causation. This is a claim about the nature of human beings discoverable prior to actual inquiry into the workings of the human mind, a claim based solely upon the alleged nonnegotiable content of our alleged concept 'free will.' The imperialist orientation is, in this regard, more audacious than that of the conservative. While the conservative is committed to saving certain concepts as far as possible consistent with other theoretical and empiri cal discoveries—where "consistency" is open to more or less stringent interpretations—the imperialist is committed to saving certain concepts come what may, no matter the violence with which discoveries in other areas of inquiry are distorted or simply ignored. Of course, there are degrees of gradation between the two. It is possible to be more or less conservative with respect to some concepts while being more or less imperialistic with respect to others. It is also important to notice that imperialists are typically most imperialistic toward dubious concepts. Indeed, it is precisely because the concepts are dubious—because of their long, persistent history or because of their recurring salience in our psychology—that the imperialist feels so confident that the concepts are not open to negotiation. It is understandable why so many theorists proceed in this manner. If we fail to reflect on Darwin's insights—if instead we take it for granted that the way we are naturally inclined to conceptualize the world reflects the way the world really is—then concepts with long historical roots and concepts that run deep in the fabric of our psychology are going to rise to the top every time. It will feel utterly natural, utterly correct, to afford such concepts substantial authority in the way we frame our intellectual tasks. It is only when we take the naturalistic turn regarding ourselves that things begin to look different. Once we see that many of the concepts we inherit from our predecessors, especially concepts concerning human agency, have their home in worldviews we no longer regard as true, it becomes obvious that the authority those concepts once wielded must now be withheld. And once we learn the myriad ways we are led astray by our own affective and cognitive capacities, especially by capacities that exercise various concepts concerning human agency, it becomes similarly obvious that the same divesture of authority applies to concepts dubious by psychological role. Niebuhr appears a robust imperialist concerning 'human agency' in much the way that Chisholm is regarding 'free will.' The charge that 27 C H A P T E R two Niebuhr levels against naturalists and rationalists is that they persist in ignoring what appears to be an essential feature of being human, namely, the "spiritual" capacity for self-transcendence. And it is precisely the imperialist strains in his orientation that provide Niebuhr the assurances he needs that no argument or evidence is required in support of this charge. His default assumptions include the following: we can know in advance of scientific inquiry that human nature essentially includes a nonnatural capacity to overcome our merely natural capacities; we can know in advance of scientific investigation that this essential capacity is not fully captured within the bounds of human reason; and so, in consequence, we know that any theory of human agency that fails to explicate and thereby preserve this integral capacity is an unqualified failure. The imperialist presumption in all this is that nothing we discover about the world can alter the requirement that, in order that anything qualify as a human agent, it must be endowed with the capacity for spiritual selftranscendence. Our Most Vexing Orientation On Niebuhr's view then we are manifest contradictions. Human nature comprises but cannot combine the spiritual and the natural, and precisely this vexes us most. But—need it be said?—Niebuhr is wrong. He is wrong to think we are self-transcendent spirits and wrong to insist we suffer antinomies between what is natural and what is not. And in a lovely bit of irony, it is precisely Niebuhr's failure, his misdiagnosis of our most vexing problem, that reveals the actual causes of our most vexing problem. What causes us to vex ourselves most is not the persistent failure to integrate the spiritual with the natural but rather the persistence of that very way of seeing ourselves! We vex ourselves because we persist in framing our inquiries in terms of concepts concerning the human self that are patently dubious. Our most vexing problem is caused not by Niebuhr's antinomies but rather by the orientation toward inquiry that leads him to his antinomies. It is, in short, the theologian's orientation—conservatism and imperialism regarding dubious concepts—that vexes us most. Niebuhr's mistake, and the mistake of all theologians, is the antecedent commitment to saving dubious concepts concerning human agency. Such a commitment is a strategic error, for it binds us to a theological worldview we no longer regard as true and invokes a host of psychological tendencies that tempt us away from the truth. This is the rhetorical insight to which Darwin appeals repeatedly throughout the Origin; this 28 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em is the insight he hoped would ease the reception of his theory. After all, no one who is genuinely concerned to discover the truth about the world would knowingly frame an intellectual task in such a way that our historical and constitutional infirmities are left in their usual places. Genuine inquiry requires that we resist certain parts of our nature as well as certain effects of our history. That Niebuhr's theological orientation embodies this sort of strategic error is a claim I defend as I proceed. Here, however, I pause to give some feel for the sorts of considerations offered in support of this charge. Begin with a single thread in the history of the concept 'selftranscendence.' We have the capacity for self-transcendence, or so it is said, but what does this come to? The claim, I take it, is that we are capable of adopting a perspective on ourselves that affords us an extraordinary degree of epistemic strength and practical control. We ascend to such levels of strength and control, presumably, by rising above the limits imposed by the contingencies of our constitution. Self-transcendence thus construed is a radical form of freedom from constraints typically associated with our status as animals—the "vicissitudes," "necessities," and "impulses" of nature—all those nasty things that might wrest from us our presumed self-control. The further we ascend out of our animal nature, the better we achieve a godlike perspective, a point of view utterly unconstrained by contingent matters. Such a view, needless to say, runs deep in our theological traditions; we are "spiritual" the closer our kinship to god. This is how Descartes (1641), for example, describes human freedom. He claims that our will is as free and infinite as God's; he claims that it is precisely with respect to our infinite will—an unconstrained capacity to act or refrain from acting in the face of inclination—that we most clearly bear within ourselves the image of God. Although nothing short of earthly death can free us entirely from our animal constraints, we can, according to Descartes, reliably discover contingent and eternal truths by prudent exercise of our free will. We can, that is, by virtue of godlike self-control, aspire to knowledge that is similarly godlike. Even this tiny fragment of the genealogy of the concept 'selftranscendence' ought to give us pause. Descartes locates our capacity for self-transcendence in freedom of the will and then locates our capacity for free will in our kinship to the Judeo-Christian god. Self-transcendence, for Descartes, is a capacity we have in so far as we were created in the image of God. But today we can no longer accept that the human will is akin to the will of God; discoveries in psychology and neuroscience, and the fact that we are evolved animals, all tell against it. We certainly cannot accept the image-of-God thesis prior to actual inquiry, and although 29 C H A P T E R two the thesis that we, in some capacity or other, bear the image of God may be logically compatible with the facts of our constitution and history, such compatibility is not the point. The scientific and historical evidence points overwhelmingly to a godless explanation of the origin and nature of the human capacity for practical reason. And it is rational to accept explanations supported by the preponderance of available evidence. It is perhaps worth harping on the point about history a moment longer. Darwin in the Origin argues incessantly against the creationists of his day. He repeatedly faces the question, "Why will my peers and people in general resist the theory of evolution by natural selection?" The question is a rhetorical one, in the sense that the correct answer suggests a strategy for maximizing the chances of convincing one's opponents. And as we have seen, Darwin gives the simple but compelling answer that most of us suffer from an undeveloped historical imagination: we fail to sum up in our minds the accumulated effects of small changes over thousands or millions of generations. That is the failure of the Hereford cattle breeder. The thing to notice is that the same point that Darwin wields against the Hereford breeder also applies to the effects on us of concepts dubious by descent. We bring to inquiry a host of concepts bequeathed to us by our intellectual predecessors and tend to expect that the most important among them will surely be preserved. That is simply how we conceive our intellectual task—the preservation of apparently important concepts. Like the Hereford breeder who fails to imagine the countless historical changes by which his preferred animal evolved, we fail to appreciate that all our concepts, including those we take to be descriptive of what we essentially are, are the evolved products of our animal history. We also fail to appreciate the powerful inertia of culturally instituted conceptual categories and the features of our psychology that anchor those cultural institutions. We fail, that is, to sum up in our minds the accumulated effects on our current conceptual scheme of changes over thousands of generations, and we fail to gauge the resistance to change that our culturally entrenched categories possess. And this makes it virtually inevitable that we will underestimate the vulnerability of our concepts to the "vicissitudes" of future changes. Turn now to what is known of our affective and cognitive dispositions and the bearing such knowledge has on our attitudes toward our concepts of human agency. The capacity for self-transcendence, as noted, is presumably the ability to achieve an extraordinary degree of epistemic insight and practical control. Yet the facts of the matter tell heavily against this happy view. This is clear from considering but a single point upon which 30 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em contemporary cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists insist, namely, the extent to which our mental lives are lived mostly beneath the level of conscious awareness and beyond the reach of conscious volitional control. As I describe in later chapters, the hypothesis that most of our psychological capacities operate below the level of awareness is increasingly compelling from empirical and theoretical work on perception, memory, emotions, practical reasoning, and more, and this hypothesis casts doubt on our alleged capacity for self-transcendence. For some psychological capacities, the challenge is that reliable first-person access is difficult or too costly; for others, the problem is that such access is not possible. In general, the only way to acquire reliable knowledge of one's mental life is to achieve a perspective external to one's first-person point of view by first developing a scientific orientation toward knowledge of one's self. There is, moreover, an additional point against the claim concerning self-transcendence, namely, that we are subject to a variety of constitutional conflicts. These conflicts arise from the fact that, while some of the systems that constitute our minds are responsive to consciously accessible inputs, many are not responsive in that way, and often the two sorts of systems operate independently of one another. We have, for example, a system that responds to conscious thoughts about actions we wish to perform and to conscious perceptions of ourselves performing certain actions. This system does not operate, so far as we can tell, in response to the low-level, nonconscious processes that actually cause us to act. The evidence indicates that the first system, the one responsive to limited conscious inputs, sometimes (and perhaps most of the time) operates independently of the other, low-level systems that generate our actions. That, at any rate, is the provocative thesis defended in Daniel Wegner's marvelous book The Illusion of Conscious Will.3 And to the extent that Wegner's theory and others like his are plausible, we must take seriously the possibility that even when we appear to be acting out of careful deliberation, the real causes of our action do not correspond to the reasons we give ourselves or others for our action. That is, we must take seriously the possibility that our sense of control and self-knowledge, even in ordinary cases, is an illusion engendered by a conflict between distinct systems within our psychology. Seen from this vantage, a vantage afforded by our best contemporary theories, the claim that we are capable of transcendent self-knowledge or control is extraordinary. It is a fanciful view of ourselves, the sources of which need to be divested of the authority they wield in the formulation of our intellectual tasks. One way to appreciate the force of Darwin's point concerning our cognitive and affective dispositions is to consider the following question. 31 C H A P T E R two If the cognitive and affective systems responsive to consciously accessible thoughts or feelings operate independently of other cognitive or affective systems (including those that cause us to act), what is it rational to expect regarding our knowledge of ourselves? And one answer to this question is that we should not expect of ourselves that we can reliably see or otherwise access the actual causes of our actions from the first-person point of view. We should expect, to the contrary, that the way we appear to ourselves—the contents of our consciously accessible thoughts and feelings—is partial or misleading and in some instances altogether mistaken. We should expect that, in order to know ourselves, we must approach our selves using our best scientific methods and, in particular, resist the default assumption that we already know on the basis of first-person considerations what we are like. And this expectation underscores a failure of imagination parallel to the one described above. Darwin's cattle breeders saw the world with undeveloped historical eyes, but it is at least as likely that we are similarly blind to relevant facts of our constitution. Most of us live with considerable confidence that we have, or that we can achieve, substantial introspective knowledge of why we do what we do. Most of us think we acquire such knowledge in ways that are obvious and unproblematic—by reflecting inwardly, for example, or by simply pausing and taking note of what is going on. But most of us are wrong on this score.4 Thus, in addition to an undeveloped historical imagination, we also suffer from an undeveloped psychological imagination, namely, the inability to see past our illusions of self-knowledge to the depths of our ignorance regarding our own agency. So Niebuhr is right that we vex ourselves, but he is wrong that we do so by way of his alleged antinomies. It is, instead, Niebuhr's own orientation toward inquiry—his commitment to conceptual conservatism and imperialism, the mark of all theology—that is the real root of what vexes us most. It is the persistence of conservatism and imperialism with respect to dubious concepts that stifles genuine inquiry. And it is the explication and defense of an alternative orientation that offers the hope for a form of inquiry that leads to progress in knowledge. A Third Orientation The third orientation toward inquiry is what I call—with no pretense of impartiality—conceptual progressivism. This orientation is at the heart of the naturalistic methods of inquiry I wish to advocate. According to the 32 O u r M o s t V e x i n g P ro b l em progressive orientation, inquiry is largely a matter of exploration. Inquiry is exploration in the way that the naturalists of the nineteenth century were explorers—Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Wallace, and Charles Darwin, for example. To adopt this orientation is to embark on the study of natural systems with the positive expectation that our settled view of the world is about to be unsettled. It is to proceed with a heightened sense that, as we approach the bounds of current knowledge, we are crossing into lands that may challenge the very categories in terms of which our knowledge is presently expressed. This is especially so for knowledge couched in concepts dubious by descent or by psychological role. Indeed, to adopt a progressive orientation toward dubious concepts is to face the crucial possibility that we are conceptually ill equipped to assimilate new discoveries, that we may be thrown into conceptual disarray and forced to flounder, even forced to create new conceptual categories to make our way forward. Genuine inquiry for the progressivist is always a looming threat to our current worldview and a looming challenge to our creative powers. Progressivism is the antithesis to conservatism and imperialism. The point of progressivism is not to preserve what appears important or unalterable but to push back the bounds of our ignorance by conforming our concepts to the world as far as possible. And, in light of what we know about our constitution and our history, we should expect to live through periods of conceptual unease and confusion. We should expect that what feels or appears important to us is often not important; our own capacities sometimes lead us astray. We should also expect, given what we know about our history, that our intuitions and hunches are calibrated in ways that often lead us astray. These sources of knowledge concerning our constitution and our history underwrite the expectation that many of our most important concepts—those concerning human agency, in particular—do not conform to the way the world in fact is. The aim of progressivism is to change this fact. The aim is to conform our selves—our concepts, our thoughts, our feelings—to better fit the nature of realty. When the progressive enters the lab or the field, the task is not to call everything into doubt. I do not suppose that the device of systematically doubting all of our beliefs is a coherent possibility. I do not even suppose that it is possible to systematically doubt a large proper subset of all we believe. Nor is there anything about the progressive orientation that suggests anything so unrestrained. The progressive is alive first and foremost to dubious concepts—to concepts dubious by descent or by psychological role—and that means that the progressive, in order to correctly identify 33 C H A P T E R two concepts that are dubious, must be informed about the genealogy of our concepts and the most compelling theories in neuroscience and psychology. Progressivism cannot be had for cheap; it is anchored by a grasp of what we currently know concerning our history and our constitution. Nor is progressivism to be conflated with what we might call intellectual humility. Humility is certainly in order regarding the historical and constitutional infirmities that afflict us. But any further pretense of humility has no place in progressivism, for at the heart of the progressive orientation is a growing body of knowledge concerning the habits of thought and dispositions of mind that retard human inquiry. The progressive expects substantial change to our current conceptual scheme, without doubt; she expects it, however, not out of affected piety but as a consequence of all that is presently known about the kind of animal we are. Although it is difficult to overstate the value of progressivism for inquiry into human agency, it is also easy to miss one of its central features, and this may lead us to overstate its value. The central feature is that progressivism as an orientation toward inquiry is entirely a product of its time and place. As long as our beliefs about our constitution and history upon which progressivism is predicated withstand the results of ongoing inquiries, the value of progressivism holds. But if the substance of what we know about our capacities or about our cultural and scientific histories should change, the elements of progressivism would have to be reevaluated. This is to say that no set of methods for human inquiry can be assessed outside the particulars of what we are like and where we have been. In so far as the details of our constitution and history rest upon a host of earthly contingencies, the methods most likely to lead us toward the truth must rest upon the same. How, given the kind of animal we are, could it be otherwise? Whether or not we care to face it, we are subjects of the natural world. It thus is prudent to adopt the task of subjecting our thoughts and feelings as far as possible to the natural world. That we can know what we are like prior to actual inquiry is a particularly pernicious lie that we, thanks to the very structure of our psychology, are geared to tell ourselves. It is also a lie we are geared to believe. The task, therefore, of adopting the progressive orientation may contribute substantially to the growth of human knowledge, including knowledge of ourselves. It is, in any event, the horse on which I am placing my bets. 34 n N THREE Naturalism as Exploration: The Elements of Reform It is obvious that the concepts we choose to guide our experimental inquiries must be as flexible and profound as the functional processes that actually exist in nature. J a a k P a n k s e pp , A f f e c t i v e N e u r o s c i e n c e The orientation of all theology and a good deal of contemporary philosophy is deeply conservative, if not imperialistic, regarding traditional concepts of human nature. This orientation retards the growth of knowledge concerning our selves. The question to ask then is, Might we correct for the historical and constitutional facts that drive us toward conservatism and imperialism? The answer is that, at present, we simply do not know the extent of our powers to correct for the biases of our history or our constitution. Still, I shall wager that at least some degree of correction is possible, provided we adopt the quite different orientation of a progressive. I shall further bet that the best way to cultivate the progressive orientation is to explicitly adopt a set of directives in the way we frame and pursue our intellectual tasks. The main business of this chapter is to introduce the core directives I have mind, the power of which I illustrate by example in subsequent chapters. I conclude this chapter with an explanation of the relationship between my discussion of agency in theories of biological functions in part 2 and my discussion in part 3 of current theories of human agency. 35 C H A P T E R three Elements of Naturalism Naturalism as exploration is not a metaphysical thesis. It is concerned rather to answer the question, By what methods are we most likely to discover the truth? Applied to the study of human agency, the question concerns methods most likely to produce knowledge of our nature. So far as I can see, and for reasons suggested in earlier chapters, among our most vital sources for answering this question are lessons culled from human history, particularly the history of modern science and the history of culture, and lessons concerning our constitution, particularly our neurology and psychology. Considerations drawn from our history and our constitution make plausible several directives for naturalistic exploration. I will introduce five of the more central directives here. Additional directives will be introduced in later chapters.1 Before I describe my directives, however, a brief word about tactics. The directives I offer are utterly banal, and intentionally so. I want constraints on inquiry based on considerations so uncontroversial that even the imperialist cannot reject them out of hand. That has an obvious strategic payoff when dealing with nonnaturalists. The downside, of course, is that serious naturalists may find me tiresome. But I beg your indulgence. For if I am right, the directives I offer, despite their banality, are not without power. There may even be room for serious naturalists to become better naturalists. One more prefatory comment. I suggested in chapter 1 that among Darwin's rhetorical insights is an insistence on the retarding effects of certain habits of thought and certain dispositions of our minds. The aim of my directives is to put a bit of flesh on these admittedly bare bones. I do not claim that these directives are formulated anywhere in the Origin. Indeed, what motivates and substantiates some of these directives are discoveries made long after Darwin's death. I claim only that, first, they are plausible on their face in light of what is known today and, second, they are in the spirit of things that Darwin does say. History of Science The first directive derives from the history of science. We make progress in our knowledge of natural systems to the extent we analyze inward and identify low-level systemic mechanisms and interactions that instantiate high-level capacities. We also make progress as we synthesize laterally across related domains of inquiry, as we look for coherence among taxonomies of mechanisms postulated in associated areas of study. Such 36 N at u ra l i s m a s E x p l o rati o n analyses and syntheses serve as checks on our theories and as mutual checks on one another. The importance of these checks is demonstrated throughout the history of science, including, for example, the evolution in our concept 'natural purpose' from Blumenbach (1781) and Kant (1790) to the modern synthesis in biology. The important claim is that the initial conceptual categories with which we begin such inquiry are often altered and sometimes destroyed as we analyze inward and synthesize laterally. It is a historical fact that as biology matured in the first half of the twentieth century, Bergson's (1907) 'life force,' a notion inherited from Blumenbach, Kant, and Kant's Romantic successors, could no longer be sustained because scientists discovered low-level physical mechanisms implementing precisely those capacities that, according to Blumenbach, Kant, and Bergson, could not be understood mechanistically. A full defense of this claim requires detailed, historical case studies and, on the basis of such studies, it is reasonable to accept the following directive: The expectation of conceptual change (EC): For systems we understand poorly or not at all, expect that, as inquiry progresses—as we analyze inward and synthesize laterally—the concepts in terms of which we conceptualize high-level systemic capacities will be altered or eliminated. It is important that (EC) expresses an expectation and nothing stronger. But it is also important that the expectation expressed can have substantive consequences for the way we frame our intellectual tasks. We should expect our initial conceptual categories to change as we analyze into complex natural systems of which we are presently ignorant. And, in light of this expectation, we should calibrate our intuitions and hunches so that an explicit openness to change in our concepts becomes our default position. This is one way we may better subject ourselves to the world. The power of (EC) and the lessons that motivate this directive are hard to exaggerate. Once we are primed to see them, we meet with illuminating instances at nearly every turn. We find them in abundance when we turn to the history of modern science. In Discovering Complexity, for example, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson (1993) describe the task of analyzing inward as a two-step process involving decomposition and localization. The bulk of their discussion comprises a wealth of detailed case studies illustrating the power of these steps, ranging from discoveries in the study of respiration and fermentation to studies of spatial memory, the nervous system, developmental genetics, and more. And although 37 C H A P T E R three Bechtel and Richardson point to limitations of decomposition and localization when applied to certain types of systemic processes—parallel distributed processing, for example—it nevertheless appears plausible that we can analyze into such systems, including those with subsystems that run in parallel on spatially distributed computations, with appropriate expansions of the basic notions involved (for example, the concept 'mechanism').2 We need not, however, restrict our view to the sophisticated case studies offered by Bechtel and Richardson (and others) to appreciate the power of the lessons that motivate (EC). We need only read the newspaper! Science writer Carl Zimmer, for example, describes recent discoveries concerning the genome of the jellyfish that appear to undermine our previous theories of their evolution, their development, even their anatomy. The discoveries involved are really quite startling. The body of a jellyfish appears incredibly simple, comprising a relatively shapeless and undifferentiated web of nerves. Its basic body plan, as Zimmer puts it, has "the symmetry of a bicycle wheel, radiating from a central axis," which is to say that the jellyfish, unlike flies or fish or human beings, has neither a front nor a back, neither a left side nor a right side (Zimmer 2005). The body of the jellyfish thus appears a rather primitive thing. This appearance of primitive simplicity understandably led systematists to hypothesize that jellyfish were among the earliest animals to evolve, descending from simple, sponge-like organisms. On this evolutionary hypothesis, bilateral organisms, which are clearly more complex, emerged many millions of years after the jellyfish. This hypothesis, however, appears to be badly mistaken. What is particularly striking is that the relevant mistakes have been uncovered as scientists have analyzed into the genetic structure of the jellyfish and then sought to synthesize their findings in genetics with theories concerning the embryology, anatomy, and evolutionary history of the jellyfish. The first discovery, based on the molecular clock of jellyfish genes, is that jellyfish evolved about 540 million years ago, at more or less the same time as bilaterians. The second discovery is that the jellyfish genome not only includes the same genes that produce the bilateral body plan in flies and fish but also that the genes involved in the production of the bilateral body plan are active during embryonic development in the jellyfish. The genes that produce a front and back during bilateral embryonic development are busy producing proteins during jellyfish development! These discoveries raise all manner of intriguing puzzles, including the question why the bilateral genes in the jellyfish fail to produce a bilateral body plan. 38 N at u ra l i s m a s E x p l o rati o n The crucial point for my purposes, however, is that these discoveries concerning the age and constitution of jellyfish genes—paradigmatic, low-level systemic mechanisms—have forced biologists to reconsider their theories of the anatomy of jellyfish. Discoveries at the level of genes have provoked changes in the concepts with which we understand large-scale phenotypic traits. As Zimmer reports, John Finnerty, a biologist at Boston University, predicts that further research will show that the nervous system of the jellyfish, far from being an undifferentiated net, "is divided into specialized regions like the human brain" (Zimmer 2005). We could hardly ask for a more vivid illustration of the power of analyzing inward. Nor could we ask for a clearer demonstration of the wisdom of following the directive in (EC), of calibrating our hunches and intuitions so that we are open to alteration in the categories with which we understand natural systems. The importance of (EC) can, in fact, be put quite generally: the confidence we invest in the concepts with which we understand high-level systemic capacities should always be proportioned to what we actually know of the low-level mechanisms that constitute the system.3 It may be worth pointing out that a commitment to the fecundity of analyzing inward is not a commitment to ontological reductionism. This is clear from what we have recently learned about reductionism in biochemistry. Consider the following form of reductionism: Reductionism (R): For any living system S, all high-level capacities are explicable in terms of generalizations quantifying over intrinsic properties of low-level systemic mechanisms. The properties of low-level mechanisms are "intrinsic" just in case they do not depend on the mechanisms being part of system S—just in case, that is, they are features that these low-level mechanisms possess even when extracted from S or placed in some other type of system. The key intuition behind (R) is that high-level systemic capacities are wholly explicable in terms of certain core properties of low-level mechanisms; stability in high-level capacities is, presumably, a direct product of stability in the core properties of low-level mechanisms. But we now know that (R) is false, at least for certain kinds of biochemical systems. The work of Boogerd et al. (2005) shows that the behavior of certain complex cells decomposes not simply into the intrinsic causal properties of low-level enzymes but also into properties that enzymes acquire only in so far as they are related in the right way to certain other chemical agents. 39 C H A P T E R three Boogerd et al. are clear that the falsity of (R) does not entail the failure of mechanistic explanation. The high-level systemic capacities of the cells they discuss are entirely explicable in terms of the causal and mechanical effects of low-level mechanisms and their relations. Nevertheless, the kind of reductionism expressed in (R) is demonstrably false, since some of the high-level capacities exemplified by living systems are explicable only in terms of the properties of low-level mechanisms that depend crucially on their place in precisely those kinds of living systems. This is enough to show that a commitment to analyzing inward, to explaining high-level capacities in terms of low-level mechanisms and their interactions, in no way entails a commitment to the form of reductionism expressed in (R). It is also worth emphasizing that the discovery reported by Boogerd et al. was made precisely because they approached the study of complex cells by following the lessons that motivate the directive in (EC)—by analyzing inward and synthesizing laterally. History of Culture The history of (at least) Western culture should make us self-consciously suspicious of what I am calling dubious concepts. As I note in chapter 2, one category of dubious concepts comprises concepts that descend from a worldview we no longer regard as true or promising. The traditional concept 'free will' as elaborated by Chisholm (1964) and others is dubious in this se