How the Intellect has Alienated us from Nature
The intellect is a powerful tool, but taking the abstractions it works with to be real can make the world seem like a hostile place
For many of us the main drama and substance of our adult lives take place in the arena of the abstract. A child first gains a sense of a world outside of them when they learn that their toy still exists when it is placed out of sight because they have learned to abstract from their sensory input and create an image of the toy in their minds. As we develop, we begin to move more and more in this realm of the mind. Relationship drama, dreams of career success, and the pursuit of scientific and philosophical speculation all move within this realm. In all these cases, we interact with ideas, laws, and concepts which we take to be instantiated in concrete, physical reality, but which themselves can only fully articulated in the conceptual realm. I do not mean to imply that these ideas and concepts are less “real” than concrete physical reality, or even that physical reality can ever be fully separated from our ideas of it. However, it can be quite surprising to realize that the ideas and ideals by which we navigate much of our lives gain their concrete reality not through physical existence but through communal belief and commitment. Let me give some examples. You cannot find your “relationship” to a person anywhere in that person’s physical manifestation. However, as soon as we get to know someone even a little bit, our notion of what kind of relationship we have with that person will deeply affect how we relate to them. Similarly, as Plato pointed out, you cannot find the essence of a “table” embodied in a singular physical object, of which all other tables are imperfect copies. Rather, we find a number of objects with a family resemblance that we cannot help but relate to as tables once we learn this concept. Finally, to get a bit more metaphysical, if we really look clearly we will find that we cannot even find time in our immediate, physical experience. Rather we find immediate present moments that we understand as moments in a timeline only when we string them together with past memories or relate to them as precursors to a possible future. We could say the same for scientific laws, philosophical claims, and our dreams for the future: although we cannot find them in immediate experience, these ideas profoundly effect how we relate to, orient towards, and understand immediate experience.
We can see the great power of abstraction in these examples. This ability to abstract allows us to inhabit a sense of a unified, cohesive world with predictable and consistent patterns. We are able to rise above our immediate sense experience desires and interact with ourselves, others, and nature based on principles, laws, and ideals that approximate the flow of experience. That being said, if we misunderstand or overestimate the power of abstraction, there is potential for profound existential and ethical confusion. German philosopher Friedrich Hegel reasons that this overestimation and misunderstanding has become prevalent in modern Western culture. Hegel suggests that modern Western culture encourages us to separate the concepts we arrive at through abstraction and take them to be true independent of the particular, concrete reality they aspire to orient and explain. Let me give a very simple example so we understand Hegel’s concern clearly. Let’s say I have a coffee mug. I relate to this mug as something I can drink coffee out of based on the connotations of the concept “mug.” However let’s say I want to use the mug as a paper weight one day. If someone came to me and said you can’t do that because that is a mug and not a paperweight, we all agree this would be absurd. At this level of physical objects, we all understand that concepts exist to help orient us to the object in a practically beneficial way. Hegel understands all universal concepts, norms, and laws to be similar. They exist to help us demarcate and orient to our experience of life in a helpful way. Ideally, concepts allow us to approximate the patterns of movement within our inner and outer worlds and sync up with those movements. However, Hegel points out that when we take a concept or explanation to exist independently of our immediate experiences in the world, it has an alienating effect. By taking an abstraction to be independently real and severing from its origin in our immediate experience, Hegel points out that the “modern intellect” makes the human being into an “amphibious animal” that “wanders about in this contradiction, and, driven from one side to the other, cannot find satisfaction for itself in either the one or the other.”
Although there are many realms in which this tendency to reify abstractions produces alienation, I want to focus on one in this post: our idea of nature. In Enlightenment and post Enlightenment Western philosophy, nature is often discussed as a kind of battle ground. For example, Thomas Hobbes writes life in nature is in a continual state of war and is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Francis Bacon uses this idea of nature as a battleground to justify human beings use of science and knowledge as a means to dominate nature and therefore come out victorious in this struggle. We find a similar idea in John Locke as well who suggests that human society functions as a social contract which we enter into with each other primarily for the purpose of staving off the continual threat of the encroachment of this chaotic “state of nature.” This tradition of philosophy provides us with an image of nature as a giant “game theory” like fight for resources and survival.
I can understand why this picture is compelling. Finding yourself lost in the woods on a cold night could easily seem like confirmation that this theory is true. However, I think this picture of nature only makes sense when we take the abstract, conceptual boundaries we draw for practical purposes too seriously in the way Hegel warns us of. Although this claim that a civilization is advanced insofar as it is able to subdue and dominate nature has been used to justify claims to the inferiority of indigenous communities, many Native American thinkers suggest that their way of life actually stands as an argument against this very standard. Our capacity for abstraction allows us to demarcate different environments, communities, and peoples; understanding them each as an independent groups. This practical use of abstraction to identify one’s own tribe is, of course, an integral element of our biological conditioning. However, there is a case to be made that Enlightenment philosophy of nature has forgotten that there was an act of abstraction that was involved in drawing these boundaries in the first palace. Native American thinker V.F. Cordova explains that, for the Native American, all living beings are equal not only in a moral sense but in a ontological sense because they are all part of one natural “process.” Although, we of course can, and sometimes should, use the power of abstraction to identify our own community in contrast to others, in reality there are no lines between communities, she claims. Rather, all living beings are part of one process that functions optimally when all beings understand their palace in the whole. From this point of view, the battleground-like understanding of nature results from taking the abstractions which set boundaries between different groups to be real independently of the unified process of life they were initially trying to explain.
Let’s come back to being lost in the woods at night. If you know you are going to be in this situation in advance, it is helpful to make a demarcation between you and the rest of nature. This demarcation allows you to represent yourself as an independent being that wants to interact with nature in a way that secures your survival. However, this demarcation is made for a practical purpose: to learn the skills needed to survive in the cold at night. Those with the proper skills often seek out this very experience as they find invigorating and life affirming. I would contend this is because they have learned to meet nature on its own terms. These people are using the power of abstraction and boundary setting to learn about the patterns of nature so they can move with those patterns, rather than reifying those abstract demarcations and thinking of themselves as fundamentally separate from that the way nature moves. From this perspective nature is not a battleground at all but a self optimizing, unified process that we can join in if we learn to approximate its laws and have the discipline to flow with them rather than against them.
Abstraction is integral to many aspects of our humanity. It is necessary to use not only for survival but also for meeting life goals, seeking knowledge, and building a functioning community. However, if we take the concepts we arrive at through the process of abstraction to be more real than that which they explain and orient towards, we end up taking an intellectual reflection of life to be life itself. I will end here with some words of wisdom from another Native American philosopher, Vine Deloria. Deloria points out that one way to challenge the rigidity of our abstractions is to simply listen beyond the boundaries of what those abstractions tell us is worth listening to. He writes,
“Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they'll talk to you if you listen. Trouble is, white people don't listen. They never learned to listen to the Indians, so I don't suppose they'll listen to other voices in nature. But I have learned a lot from trees; sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit”
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