The Perfectly Natural Criteria of the Natural:

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I want to deal with references to nature and how they can often be abused by the authoritarian personality. First of all, let us admit that almost everyone turns to nature to underwrite the rightness of their assertions. This would seem perfectly natural (huh?) since we, and everything about us is rooted in nature. It is what we as a society have evolved from. Nor do I see any reason that we shouldn’t lay it on table as one kind of tactic in a language game among others. But the problem starts when we start to act as if it has some kind of privilege, a privilege that could only rest on a circular assumption that I would refer to as The Perfectly Natural Criteria of the Natural. And like most assumptions I have seen, it is a human construct and, by virtue of that, floats on thin air.

For one thing, for all our throwing around the term nature, it’s never really clearly defined. It’s always understood in terms of difference. A tree would seem to be natural. A canoe cut out of it would seem to be a little less natural. And a canoe made out of fiberglass would seem to be less so. However, if we approach it from Ambig’s emphasis on Dasein, we have to ask what could be any more natural than kayaking in a fiberglass vessel in a natural environment. Since there is no clear point at which human ingenuity has gone from the nature it is rooted in to the unnatural, there is no clear distinction between the natural and unnatural. And for good reason, some thinkers such as Gary Snyder (poet, naturalist, and Zen scholar) have argued that the distinction does not exist.

Yet the authoritarian personality acts as if such a clear distinction does exist without ever really clarifying where that threshold in the continuum is –that is outside of what they feel it to be. For instance, I have many times heard it argued or implied that because there are alpha males throughout nature, apes for instance, it would be perfectly natural for certain human individuals to accumulate power and use it as they see fit. Of course, the response we could pose against this is that by that same token, since power seems to be the main criteria of right and the “natural”, it would be equally natural for weaker members to pool their power to act as a check to the power of the alpha male, thereby insuring circumstances that are better and more just to the weaker members. Of course, the authoritarian personality will immediately resort to this threshold or dividing line they can never truly pinpoint by acting as if the group exercise of power is somehow not natural. It is this fallacy that underlies such notions as the feminization of man and the leveling of mankind. And it is what underlies this popular notion among right-wingers that Capitalism is somehow natural while socialism is somehow the unnatural construct of man –the hypocrisy of it being that the rules of Capitalism are as much a human construct as anything.

Of course, always piggybacking this questionable notion is a kind Social Darwinism that TlBs use to justify their nonsense. The argument is that competition is essential to intellectual growth. In other words, it rides on the Nietzscheian notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you strong, that you can only grow through opposition. The thing is, I tend to find, on these boards, that my most productive moments come from interacting with people who have the same live and let live attitude I do. What I mainly find or get from interactions with TlBs is myself too busy swatting off flies to actually engage in anything that might prove intellectually productive. At bottom, when you truly look at it, all the TlB’s reference to nature proves to be is little more than an alibi to act like assholes –that is while hiding under the banner of authentic intellectual inquiry.

But even without all that, even if I was inaccurate in my description, we still have to look at the naturalistic fallacy of assuming that because something seems to be in violation of nature or our nature, we are obligated to base our ethical, social, and political decisions on it, a notion which hangs itself on the perfectly natural criteria of the natural: a human construct if there ever was one.

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We are not obliged to hang our hat on it, if they are extensionshidden connections, to bridge the apparent division, which is really not. Gary aid it, most particularly in Household, where the play on words, check it out -house-hold, can mean mostly on the people inside, not the actual structure, and yet the house has to hold to shelter those inside, the household. Inside or out, inside and out, do you really need to be inside to know what being inside can be? Better to be outside, to be more objective?

But then what separated the inside and the outside? Thin walls, the walls do not define the inside from the outside, the separation is spurious, once the house doesn’t hold, the walls are irrelevant, they are just plain-plane. They only function relative to the spaces the separate, and they can’t hold the spaces, of the tensions are too great, they are mere symbols in the grand scheme of things, we put up walls and attach significance to them, to keep spaces apart, but their apartments are only a part of the whole, the whole is implied, it is the whole that is seen as dysfunctional, cubicles, cubism, are like beehives, affording some autonomy, as whence we came individually from the apart-ment of the womb, and thrown into the whole-some separation,where the household can function as a unit yet singularly determined to become different.

Socialism is the opposite, capitalists say, we all seek our uniqueness, but with the precision of a miller’s grind, that slowly as dust is sanded down, and then,the great eccentrics fearing their differance, try to put some life in them as god, did blow the soul into man,as in beardsly. It’s a unique power play, of difference into conformity and then into difference, again. That underlies our vastly different projection of god, god as the arbiter par excellence of the naturalistic fallacy, the god who dares to be totally different to the degree even of becoming invisible. Who doesn’t wish to be that but those who fear death most? The ultimate arbitration.

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Reading your point, Obe, I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall. In it are two repeated counterpoints:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

And:

Good fences make good neighbors.

The point is that while such boundaries are arbitrary in being human constructs and, consequently, in violation of nature, they still have the practical effect of maintaining the peace.

And this goes to my point to the extent that it would be courting the naturalistic fallacy in assuming that simply because something happens to seem natural, it must be the right course of action. In this poem, Frost basically poses the classicist position, that which gives privilege to the products of civilization over man in his natural state, against the idealistic and romantic. He gives credit to both positions as being valid. But at the same time, he presses, and manages to sell, a counterpoint to the romantic beautiful soul who builds their argument on what is natural -Frost being a classicist himself.

But the point I’m making goes a different way. What I’m arguing is that the elusiveness of this dividing line/threshold allows the authoritarian personality to act as if such a threshold exists, by pointing to differentials between what seems natural and what does not, without ever really dealing with where this threshold lies on the continuum. They appeal to emotion and emotional responses. This is why they can get away with acting as if homosexuals are genetic anomalies since, to many heterosexuals, they seem a little less than natural.

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In this particular run, I want to deal with sex, its function as concerns reproduction, how it gets muddled up in the perfectly natural appeal to the natural, and do so in reference to the notion that any sexual act that doesn’t contribute to reproduction is somehow unnatural (i.e. homosexuality). But note that this is in a seedling/developing stage, and would, at this point, be prone to a lot of fumbling around with chain of reasoning and terminology, and being just plain wrong. And before I go on, I will be using the term “ecological status” to denote the relationship between a particular phenomenon and Nature (or the natural) as it is idealized. The point is that what seems to be closest to the natural or ideal nature will be considered, for the sake argument, to have higher ecological status –ecology being a description of relationships between systems in nature. And I do so because ecological status lies at the heart of debate between what can be considered natural and what can be considered unnatural.

That said, I would argue that nature, in terms of sex, has played a conspiratorial role in the confusion and loose talk that goes on around nature and the natural. First we start with the will to reproduce which I would argue as being external to the subject and almost metaphysical in that it describes an imperative that is more evolutionary in nature. This is so because nature and evolution, in its ad hoc way of doing things, has chosen the sexual drive as the primary driving mechanism behind the will to reproduce. And already we are faced with the question of the ecological status of the will to reproduce since nature basically had to trick the subject into having sex in order to reproduce. And this gets some support from the certainty that most heterosexual acts of sex committed, given the increased use of birth control, are generally not aimed at the purpose of reproducing. In fact, it’s almost as if reproduction is treated like an involuntary risk involved in the scratching of that raw itch. And given that, nature’s choice to use the sex drive as the driving mechanism seems a little self defeating in that the sex drive has managed to distract from the original point of reproduction, this being because the sex drive, by virtue of it being biological, is dumb: it is little more than a raw itch that wants to be scratched.

Of course, the main reason this is significant is that it brings us to question the wisdom of nature which, consequently, is of import since we are questioning an ideology that rests itself on the authority of nature.

But before we finish with this particular stage in the interrogation, and to give a sense of where we’re going with this, we need to question the ecological status of the will to reproduce, the supposed evolutionary/metaphysical mandate, as compared to the sex drive which is an internal mandate to the subject. If we go with the notion that the will to reproduce has the higher ecological status, then we have to go with the homophobe that argues that homosexuality is a violation of the natural. However, if we recognize that nature, in its apparently bumbling way and indirect methods has managed a mechanism, the sexual drive, that has managed a higher ecological status than the reproductive mandate, then we have no such commitment to the homophobe. And saying that they are equal does the evolutionary puritan no good since we would still be perfectly free to admit that address to the sexual drive has as much ecological status in the homosexual as it does in the heterosexual.

Anyway, in the next episode: more.

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There is no metaphysical will to reproduce separate from the libido or the subject; nature and evolution are not separate phenomena.

The unnatural enters with the use of contraception, an attempt to pervert nature. To use this as an example of why most natural heterosexual acts do not result in children is poor reasoning and contradictory to your argument in the least.

That you try to justify homosexuality based upon a deception committed by nature is revealing no?

It’s like watching a badly scripted film, the kind where the plot is transparent. The author already has an end in mind, and so works backwards inventing whatever circumstances are required to get there.

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And before we go on, let us also note that admitting that the will to reproduce has higher ecological status basically forces us to admit that any expression of the sexual drive that does not explicitly work towards reproduction must be considered unnatural: masturbation, sex among couples that can’t reproduce, oral or anal sex, and so on and so on and “onward Christian soldier!”The interesting thing about this is the cozy relationship that seems to exist between the secular puritan and the religious puritan they claim to have made some radical break with.

That said, if we think the model through, we recognize that something is missing. We have to recognize that people don’t, for the most part, scratch the itch of the sex drive with anything that happens to come along. Furthermore, we have to recognize the legitimate imperative of evolution to propagate the genetic make-up that best insures adoption and survival.

We’ll start with the latter and point to its similarity to the will to reproduce in being an external metaphysical factor that often finds itself expressed through social influences: what we will call the will to propagate as in propagation of the optimal genetic makeup. But what is important to note here is that this is a different thing than the individual gene machine’s desire to propagate its own genetic makeup: a natural product of the individual’s assumption (that is subconsciously) that their genetic makeup is worth carrying on.

That matter is one of what I will call sexual desire which mediates between the will to propagate and the sexual drive. This aspect, like the sex drive, is internal and what allows the individual to distinguish between what they want to scratch the itch of the sexual drive with and that with which they would prefer not to. It is what determines our attraction to a given other.

And it is in the domain of sexual desire (that which decides how the sexual drive is expressed or satisfied) that the secular puritan finds their aversion to the homosexual. This is because they naively think of the will to propagate as some kind of fixed entity that always has and always will propagate an obsolete notion of the optimal genetic makeup: the Spartan male that represents ideal masculinity. In this sense, they find themselves mired in the folly of neo-classicism. Of course, this results from a rather superficial understanding of the will to propagate in that they fail to recognize the dynamic aspect of it. They, caught in their likely media-driven fancy supplemented by a half-assed understanding of Nietzsche, simply cannot fathom the possibility that the primary imperative of the will to propagate dictates an evolving notion of the optimal genetic makeup that can adopt best to a constantly evolving landscape. This is why they simply cannot grasp the possibility that the reason that homosexuality is growing more visible and more common is that possibilities posed by overpopulation make the genetic makeup that blocks the will to reproduce the optimal one.

In the next run, I want to go into how the evolutionary puritan’s focus on sexual desire puts them in a hypocritical position in that, since their position comes from the level that may well have a lower ecological status than the sex drive, they argue from the same ecological status that homosexuals find themselves attracted to the same sex. I will argue that their position, if we go by their criteria, is no more “natural” than the homosexual’s choice of how they express their sexual drive.

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First, bonobo societies operate through a currency of sex, including oral, do not discriminate by age or gender, and do not entertain monogamy, so there is at least one ‘natural’ precedent. Second, this assumes man is capable of being unnatural, which I find to be patently false; if we ourselves are products of nature, how is anything we do not then also ‘natural’ by extension? Natural is such an equivocal term today; it could mean the distinction between acts of man and acts of everything else (which is just a bit narcissistic), the marketing ploy to tickle your environmental conscience, or just that something’s copacetic with a vague universal normative function. But is the fallen tree felled any more naturally by a bolt of lightning, a flood, a tornado, a beaver, termites, etc. than by a man with a saw? Why?

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There is such a thing as undisturbed and disturbed natures, and those two ideas make allot more sense than natural and unnatural. Who can come over to re-define what it means to be natural, or change the meaning of the word. You should know that english isn’t philosophically perfect. Many words have false meanings, including the word “natural”.

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What d63 seems to be getting at is what I call the natural/artificial distinction. Natural must be a property of some thing which must not be man-made. Artificial must be a property of a thing which must be man-made. So the distinction is clear. But we have to ask ourselves if this distinction is something the philosopher should be worried about. So far, I have found much use for this distinction. It does not seem to help me solve a deep philosophical problem, at least not yet. Maybe in the future I will need this distinction.

The thesis of the OP seemed to be something along the lines that because the distinction could not be clearly drawn one could not make arguments that natural is better than unnatural. Although I believe the distinction can be drawn, I agree with the OP that what is natural is not necessarily better.

There is another sense of natural however which I do find interesting. On the one hand, natural is what is not man-made. On the other hand, natural is what is not abstract. So, mathematics concerns the abstract world but when it is brought into the natural world it is hard to get the numbers to work, for example, making a perfect triangle is impossible due to the uncertainty principle.

This distinction can be drawn as follows:

Natural must be a property of a thing which causes other things to exist.
E.g., atoms cause triangles to exist. Atoms cause trees to exist but trees are a concept under which collections of atoms fall.

Abstract must be a property of a thing which does not cause other things to exist.
E.g., the number two does hurt anyone. The fact that dinosaurs are extinct does not cause anything.

However, I used the word “cause” in my definition which is just as difficult to define as “natural” is, so let’s examine that.

x causes y means x changes the probability of y’s existence more than anything else.
x is probable means x is very possible.
“very” and “possible” are indefinable.

Also, let me deal with a possible counterexample. Someone might reasonable believe that the fact that dinosaurs are extinct causes kids to become sad because kids want to interact with them. It’s the kids that are causing the sadness not the fact. This is demonstrated by the fact that if you told this fact to monkeys they would not do anything.

On the other hand, for every cause there is something that allows. So facts allow things to happen but they do not cause things to happen.

x allows y to cause z means if x did not exist then y could not cause z.

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Some good points 11* and Dan. Wish I had the time to respond right now. But I come on with a plan and a small window to execute it. But it’s good to see discourse carried out the way it should be.

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The following is a point that I’ve cooled on since I started this. But I still think it is still worth considering.

If we look at sexual desire, where the conflict seems to emerge, and consider its ecological status as compared to the sexual drive, we might recognize, given its cognitive nature and the semi-social will to propagate, we might acknowledge that its ecological status is lower than that of the sex drive and the will to reproduce that underlies it. In other words, because it acts on what it has intellectually determined to be worth wanting, it is more removed from the natural state that the sex drive and will to reproduce represent. Plus that, while I have been talking anthropomorphically about the will to propagate, all evidence suggests that evolution has never been a matter of the will to propagate consciously deciding what genetic makeup is optimal, but rather a random one of organisms following their sex drive and environmental factors eliminating those genetic makeup’s that do not adapt to it.

Furthermore, given the authoritarian’s propensity for arbitrarily inserting thresholds between the natural and unnatural, we can justifiably insert one between the sex drive and sexual desire –that is since sexual desire has the more artificial quality of being, to some extent, a human construct.

One of first consequences of this would be to recognize that since no natural choice can be made in the domain of sexual desire, it would make no sense to speak of sexual desire for someone of the same sex as any more natural or unnatural than to speak of sexual desire of someone of the opposite. In other words, it would make no real productive sense for the puritan (religious or secular) to refer to the homosexual as being unnatural.

Furthermore, this puts the puritanical authoritarian in the precarious place of arguing from an unnatural position –that is since their argument must work in the domain of sexual desire. The irony and poetic justice of it is that by seeing the unnatural aspect of the homosexual, they only shed light on their own unnatural position.

And before I move on to other things, I want to make a point concerning the authoritarian’s toying with eugenics in the light of the model I have presented. And I’m not being hyperbolic here. I have literally read people on these boards discussing it out of some pseudo-noble notion of “facing the facts”.

They argue from the perspective of the will to propagate. And as they see it it would make sense to stop weaker genetic makeups from reproducing –such as the mentally handicapped. The hypocrisy of this is that this forces them to turn to the perfectly unnatural solution of forced sterilization. At this point, it seems as if references to nature are only legitimate when it suits the authoritarians’ purposes. And how much credibility can we give to that?

And doesn’t this shed some doubt on the authority of nature in the first place? Of course, sexual desire might seek out the optimal genetic makeup: the alpha male will seek out the best females. But this only leaves the lesser females to the lesser males. And given the power of the sex drive, it’s hard to see how they could refuse it. You see it all the time in dive bars. It’s as if nature works against itself.

Of course, the authoritarian mindset will bypass this by arguing for an environment that will eliminate the lesser genetic makeup. But that only highlights the moral vacuum at work in their thought –the sociopathy. But by trying to justify it, what they’re asking others to do is accept misery for the sake of the higher principle of evolution as they see it. But replace the term “evolution” with the term “God” and it might sound familiar?

Once again: onward Christian soldiers!

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My point, exactly, line. I just don’t see, because man is always a product of nature, any solid foundation for making a distinction between natural and unnatural –although I think Numbers makes a credible point with the natural/artificial distinction. Ultimately, if there are distinctions, they are generally relative and a matter of difference with no real center.

The problem for me, is that authoritarian personality tends to act as if there is some clear threshold between the 2: heterosexual vs. homosexual, Capitalism vs. Socialism, and I’m sure there are more. The argument we get from the Neo-Nietzscheian Gospel of the Fanciful is that mankind, having settled for an environment somewhat more comfortable than that of brutes, has somehow deprived himself of his natural essence. But what is that “natural essence”? It seems to me that the only natural essence there could be is that which we evolve into.

They would seem to make more sense, Dan, since they are much easier to distinguish. The problem you have to deal with though is what was implied in the relationship between the sexual drive and sexual desire. The sexual drive is basic and without discrimination while sexual desire is a product of evolution because it incorporates the cognitive: that which evolved from basic instincts. Therefore, we could think of the mind as a disturbance of the natural. Let’s be clear, I’m not ripping your point down. It makes perfect sense. I’m only suggesting that it may succumb to the same lack of clarity that this issue poses to us.

And you’re: language isn’t perfect. It simply cannot reflect reality as much it can interact with it as one kind of system among others. But this points to the failure of the authoritarian personality in that they tend to act like language is reality. This is why they can argue that Homosexuality is unnatural and act like that is all there is to it. This could only work on people who are more fixated on the word “unnatural” to actually take a look at the complexity of the reality of it.

Yes, numbers, the natural/artificial distinction would seem to be the more practical since it points to what might be better or worse for us as concerns food or the environment. Plus that, while one can see the authoritarian getting away with arguing that the homosexual is unnatural, it’s a lot harder to see them getting away with it by referring to them as artificial.

The only qualification I would offer is the difference between the tree, the canoe carved from it, and a canoe made of fiberglass. By your criteria, we could easily argue the fiberglass canoe to be artificial. But we still have to question if the distinction works between the tree and the canoe carved from it.

That said: good choice of pic. I think Tina Fey is one of the hottest women out there. She’s kind of filled in for Genneane Garoffolo who came off as a little too frigid in her last standup routine. Still a beautiful woman though.

This one gets a little beyond me, given the circumstances under which I do this. But the important thing I do see in it, as I did in your previous post, is that you are struggling with it. And that, to me, shows a hell of lot more integrity than just making statements and acting as if that is the final word on it. You even bring analytic tools into the game –tools I’m not that good with. It’s impressive.

Look forward to jamming with you. U2 Dan. Thanks guys.