Whose Nature? Which Morality? On Kohák’s Moral Sense of Nature

Abstract

Since Pythagoras made the body (soma) the tomb (sema) of the soul, it has been common for Western philosophy to understand the human essence as foreign from bodily nature. Though dreary, such dualisms have often seemed the only alternative to a naturalism that, from Democritus to Darwin, has threatened to undermine human uniqueness, and human morality in particular, by absorbing the mind in a nature inhospitable to moral value. The Aristotelian and hence Scholastic philosophy of nature mitigated this problem by suffusing nature with tele. But science since Galileo purged nature of purpose. Hobbes drew the ethical implications of modern mechanism with characteristic nonchalence: “whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill [sic]... For these words... are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so... ” (Hobbes, I, 6, p.120). Descartes and other dualists struck the bargain of granting to nature what is nature’s and to mind what is mind’s, accepting the resultant enigmas as the price for avoiding the Hobbesian conclusion. Defenders of mind with more chutzpah,however, following the dictum that the best defense is a good offense, declared nature a province of mind, and especially, of Geist. German idealism was eventually succeeded by a metaphysically chastened, but no less anti-naturalistic phenomenology in the work of Husserl. Throughout this abbreviated story, one theme remains virtually constant: with few exceptions, all sides in the modern debate have accepted the discontinuity of morality and nature as such. For morality’s defenders this discontinuity has been a two-edged sword, since it leaves the moral soul precariously out on a limb, waiting to be hacked off by a new wave of scientific advance. Thus in the twentieth century bedfellows as strange as positivism and existentialism have agreed on the discontinuity of morality and nature — and consequently held morality incapable of rational justification. Note the following remark from one of Europe’s foremost thinkers: Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day... proudly defiant of the irresistable forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. (Russell, p. 47) KeywordsMoral ObligationEnvironmental EthicMoral SenseMoral SignificanceMoral DemandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.