One of the most important threads connecting the central philosophical con-cerns of early modern thinkers with those of today is a vexed relationship
with what we nowadays call naturalism. Of course, “naturalism” can be said inmany ways. And so, to determine whether to embrace a naturalistic outlook,we need to know: Exactly what is at stake in doing so? In contemporary philoso-phy, stock answers to this question are often given in terms of the doctrine of
1. Thanks go to Reshef Agam-Segal, Joseph Almog, Etienne Balibar, Tyler Burge, AntonioCapuano, John Carriero, Sarah Coolidge, Brian Copenhaver, Harry Frankfurt, Christopher Frey,Kristina Gehrman, Keren Gorodeisky, Jodie Graham, Jeff Helmreich, Arata Hamawaki, AndrewHsu, Kelly Jolley, Roderick Long, Peter Murray, Paul Nichols, Guy Rohrbaugh, Sheldon Smith, andMichael Watkins for helping develop these ideas in conversation, seminar discussion, and corre-spondence, and/or for comments on earlier drafts; and to all the participants of the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles (UCLA) Metaphysics Group and the ongoing Spinoza seminar at UCLA,which suffered through many presentations during which I struggled to articulate the beginningsof the present argument. Joseph Almog’s Everything in Its Right Place: Spinoza and Life by theLight of Nature (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), chap. 7; Etienne Balibar’s “Spinoza: FromIndividuality to Transindividuality” (1993, unpublished manuscript) and Spinoza and Politics,trans. Peter Snowdon (New York: Verso Books, 2008); Sarah Coolidge’s “Conceptual Carbon andCosmic Carbon” (unpublished manuscript); Gilles Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy:Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992); Paul Hoffman’s “The Unity ofDescartes’s Man” and “The Union and Interaction of Mind and Body” (parts 1 and 2) in his Essayson Descartes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Howie Wettstein’s “Terra Firma:Naturalism and Wittgenstein,” The Monist 78 (1995): 425–46 are all texts that provided me withinvaluable inspiration. This article is, like many of these texts, an attempt to mine the insightsburied in Spinoza’s theory of finite individuals as modes of substance/nature/God.
physicalism: the view that everything in the world around us (or perhaps every-thing whatsoever) entirely is or depends on the physical. For example, discussionsof the nature of human cognitive life often take as their starting point a questionlike:“What is the relation between the mental and the physical?”And the fortunesof naturalism about the mind are usually held to rest on what this relation turns outto be. To the extent that we end up thinking that the mental is quite far removedfrom the physical, we leave naturalism behind.
It is fair to ask a naïve question here: what exactly is the connection beingpresupposed between naturalism and the physical? Indeed, from the point of viewof many early modern debates in metaphysics, it is likely to seem as if thesediscussions begin somewhat late in the game. Of course, the terms “mental” and“physical” are the descendants, respectively, of the early modern terms “thinking”and “extended.” However, the familiar debates about thought and extension tookplace against a very different intellectual background.
That is, children of the early moderns that we are, we usually take for grantedthat the key distinction for understanding the nature of human cognitive life is thatbetween the mental and the physical. In contrast, philosophers of the seventeenthcentury made no such assumption but rather came to accord a special role to thedistinction between thought and extension by struggling with something like thenaïve question—in particular, struggling to understand the nature that our con-temporary term “naturalism” seems to invoke. What is this thing called nature?What is at stake in our conception of it? In particular, of what consequence is thatconception to our understanding of ordinary natural individuals? Early modernphilosophers tackled such questions head on and so came to think that the natureof human life poses a special problem—for example, that the distinction betweenthought and extension is a deeply troubling one.2
2. The problem of understanding the distinction between thought and extension is what PaulHoffman (op. cit.) describes, in the form in which it is found in Descartes, as the problem of “theunity of man” (i.e., the unity of the distinct aspects of a human being—mind and body). Thisproblem, however, is grounded in a prior problem: of the unity of the man (the human being) withnature—what we might call the man/nature problem. That is, it is because Descartes felt the forceof the latter problem (seeing the nature of human cognitive life as playing a role in a satisfactoryaccount of the nature of nature—in Cartesian terms, of the attribute of extension) that he wasfaced with the former one. Thus, prior to the question of how Descartes solves the problem of theunity of man, there is the question: Why exactly is Descartes led to this problem in the first place?Why, in other words, does he think the unity of the man with nature poses such a deep problem?If, for example, it were to turn out that it is possible to dissolve the man–nature problem thatDescartes perceived, then any solution to the problem of man’s unity would turn out to be idle. Iargue in what follows that a great many parties in the debate over our contemporary man–natureproblem—that is, that between physicalism and its discontents—partake in a kind of primalantinaturalism: the exclusion of many aspects of our thought about human beings, in particular,from what I call the “language of nature.” In fact, I argue that the most hard-headed reductivephysicalists partake in this primal antinaturalism.Although my task will not be to defend the claimthat the man–nature problem I outline is precisely the same as that that vexed Descartes, I dobelieve that it is worthwhile to pose a question about “unitarian” interpretations of Descartes onthe mind–body relation—of which Hoffman’s hylomorphic account of the mind–body relation isan outstanding example. Namely, unitarian as they are, are they victim to something like primalantinaturalism? Spinoza, for example, seems to have made just this sort of charge against Des-cartes’s substantial distinction between mind and body. For interesting discussions of Spinoza’s
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It is a striking fact about contemporary metaphysics that while naturalism istaken as a central topic, the philosophy of nature as such is almost entirely absenttherein. Questions like the ones just mentioned are unfashionable, and manyphilosophers are likely to think of them as obscure. It seems to me that this hasbeen to our detriment.This is because I think, not only that the foregoing questionsabout nature are just the ones we need to answer in order to understand the stakesof naturalism, but also that answers to them are already implicit in philosophicaldebates that seem, on the face of it, to be entirely uninterested in them. For thisreason, there is a great deal of clarity to be gained by reinserting these relativelyneglected early modern concerns back into the contemporary debates about natu-ralism.
Or so I will argue later. That is, I will argue that what is fundamentally atstake in the question of whether to adopt a naturalistic outlook is natural unity—the hanging together of nature as a whole. In particular, the drive toward naturalunity explains why physicalism can seem like not simply an attractive view but anunavoidable one.
Of course, physicalism is notoriously vulnerable to worries about the natureof human life. The general shape of such worries is that in order to preserve arobust conception of human beings and their special nature—both cognitive andpractical—we must either give up physicalism or embrace human exceptionalism:the view that human beings must, in important respects, stand outside nature.
Against this perceived dilemma, I will argue that physicalism rests on amisunderstanding of the demands of a naturalistic outlook—that is, of naturalunity. Further, rather than being the staunch opponent of physicalism it is oftentaken to be, the drive toward human exceptionalism is parasitic, so to speak, on themistaken foundations of physicalism. To these ends, I will offer an alternative tophysicalism—a Spinoza-inspired view I call pluralistic monism. I will argue that itsatisfies the demands of natural unity without falling into physicalism’s confusionsand without allowing exceptionalist worries to so much as get a grip.
1. THE TWO DRIVES
What speaks most fundamentally in favor of a naturalistic outlook? We might saythat to be a naturalist about x is to think x is a part of nature. But what is that? Ourmost basic conception of nature is something like “the world around us.” On thisconception, being part of nature would simply mean being part of that world. I willcall this very basic form of naturalism naïve naturalism.
Naïve naturalism, I suggest, is not what is at stake in the contemporaryconversation about naturalism. In an ordinary sense, a human being’s cognitive andpractical life clearly unfolds in the world around us—namely, wherever and when-ever he or she thinks or acts.Thus, if we were to think that naïve naturalism is whatis at stake for defenders and critics of naturalism, then, we would thereby cast theirdebate in a strange light. We would think of naturalism’s defenders as defending
naturalism, cf. Michael Della Rocca’s Spinoza (New York: Routledge, 2008) and his Representationand the Mind–Body Problem in Spinoza (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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something with which nearly everyone agrees, its critics as claiming that humansare, at best, only partially present in the world around us and thus, into theembarrassing position of having to say where else human lives could be unfolding.
The debate over naturalism becomes more intelligible understood as adebate concerning our place in nature. What do I mean by this? When trying tounderstand what something in nature is, we face the fact of natural diversity. Whatis present in any natural locale—a solar system, toothpaste tube, or human body—looks very different from what is present elsewhere. To make sense of naturaldiversity, we situate it against the background of natural unity. Our grip on naturaldiversity, that is, seems incomplete unless we can understand natural phenomena interms of our overall picture of nature as a whole—unless we can naturally integratethem.
Now, natural integration is nothing more exotic than what we find at work innatural science. Suppose we see some carbon behaving in a way that is incompat-ible with our current understanding of carbon. In response, we might think ourcarbon theory flawed, or that we made a mistake gathering observations anddrawing conclusions from them, or even that this stuff is not carbon at all. Butconcluding that carbon just happens to work differently in this locale would be amistake. It would amount to giving up on understanding what carbon is, concedingthe existence of supernatural carbon. Ultimately, an account of carbon’s nature willbe satisfactory only if it tells us what unity there is among the diverse manifesta-tions of carbon and between carbon and the diversity in nature as a whole.The bestscientific accounts we have of carbon do just that—by telling us, for example, thatcarbon atoms are made up of ingredients that in different combinations make upevery atom whatsoever, and why something composed in just that way behaves asit does in varying circumstances. In doing so, they push toward carbon’s completenatural integration. This explains why we find them satisfying.
As with carbon, so with us. In “common life and conversation,” naïve natu-ralism about human life is our default setting: We experience that life—includingwhat is most exceptional about it—as something that manifestly unfolds in theworld around us. A woman sits next to me when I arrive at the cafe, sipping coffeewith irritation on her face at the nearby man shouting into his cell phone. That sheis alive, acting, and in a particular state of mind, here amidst me, the tables andother persons—all this is obvious from a casual glance. And though philosopherssometimes presume otherwise, the same is true of myself. Likewise irritated, I catchthe woman’s glance and roll my eyes in sympathy at her, and we silently tradesmiles. When I do, I experience my thinking and action as a further episode of myown history, unfolding here and now in this cafe. In my experiences of my own lifeand the lives of others, I am a naïve naturalist about human life—including humanthought and action—before I even have my morning coffee.3
3. My talk of naïve naturalism as our “default setting” owes a great deal to Howie Wettstein’sdiscussion (op. cit.) of the “terra firma” naturalism he finds in Wittgenstein. In particular, Wet-tstein’s claim that there is a form of naturalism that is in place prior to the setting in of thetheoretical distinctions in which philosophical debate (indeed, debate in the culture at large) isoften couched is an insight upon which my argument draws heavily.
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Because it is our default setting, naïve naturalism is the starting point fromwhich theoretical forays into the study of human nature depart. It would seem thatto get from this starting point to an understanding of what each of us is requiresjust what is required for carbon or any other natural being: finding a place forus, including what is remarkable about us, in nature. The project would then be tonaturally integrate human life—a project that begins with naïve naturalism andends with naturalism enriched.
But we are sometimes apt to disengage from the default setting—that is, tothink of ourselves as standouts in nature. Here, I do not mean simply that we thinkof ourselves as exceptional—bits of nature that are different from anything else init. Anything in nature is exceptional in this sense: As naïve naturalists, we wouldhave no reason to deny it. And in fact, this is precisely what natural integrationseeks not only to address but also to preserve.
Rather, we sometimes slide from thinking of ourselves as exceptional tothinking of ourselves as exceptions—as exemptions, so to speak, from the standardsto which we hold everything else in nature. In particular, this drive toward humanexceptionalism shows up in certain of the theoretical forays that philosopherssometimes engage in. It is here—in two philosophical motifs, in particular—thatthe perceived tension between this drive and the drive toward natural unity isclearest.
The first motif is of human beings as spectators to nature—the spectator motiffor short. The locus for this motif lies in philosophical conceptions of mind. At theroot of our ordinary notion of mind are events we witness all around us. I sit on theporch on a warm summer night and see a pair of katydids flying loopty loops. Aplayer on the field stumbles and twists his or her knee, and I see his or her facecrumple in pain. As we sit in the hospital waiting room, my heart sinks as I see mybrother tapping his feet and know that he is wondering what to do if our mother’ssurgery goes badly.What ties these disparate events together is something like this:Human beings have a point of view on the world, one that, in many respects,is unlike those had by anything else we know of. Each of us has the world in hersights, and there is something it is like for this to be so. All of the events Imentioned manifest this—the life of a human mind unfolding in the world.
But what I am calling the spectator motif goes beyond these observations.Here, we do not think of our encounters with the world as akin to those thatspectators have at a sports event or concert—that is, spectators who, like thoseinvolved in the spectacle they watch, are equal participants in a collective event.Rather, like Sartre’s voyeur, we think of ourselves as outsiders peeking in at naturefrom outside.
This much stranger notion of ourselves as spectators shows up in conceptionsof the mind as a subject matter that can—entirely or in part—be considered inisolation from nature. It emerges somewhere in the distance we sometimes travelfrom our ordinary experiences of mind to certain philosophical conceptionsthereof. We begin thinking that the world seems to us a certain way. We end uptalking about “seemings” with which we can be presented in the total absence of aworld. Or we begin thinking of what it was like to be hurt as akin to the force of thepunch that hurt us—yet another feature of our encounter with the mugger.We end
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up talking about “what-its-like-nesses” and wondering how they could possibly bepart of nature. Or we begin thinking that the world strikes us so that, often in utterconfusion, we face the task of figuring out what has inserted itself into our cognitivelives. We end up thinking of ourselves as reaching out into the world through a veilof concepts or senses to make cognitive contact with it.
Traveling the distance in these ways leads us to various versions of what I amcalling the spectator motif—versions, respectively, concerning thought, conscious-ness, and intentionality.4 We think and talk in these terms to signal a momentousproblem: how, having considered them apart, to bring mind and world backtogether again. This problem is a manifestation of the drive toward human excep-tionalism: specifically, exceptionalism about human ways of having a viewpoint onthe world. We are nagged repeatedly by the suspicion that the natural integrationof our cognitive lives will lose something about what we are.
It is important to remember, though, that because this strikes us as a problem,it is also a manifestation of the drive toward natural unity.The exceptionalist viewsinto which we sometimes argue ourselves are unsettling. We realize somethingis scandalous about them so that even an unwavering exceptionalist knows he orshe must overcome serious hurdles to attain a hard-won defense of her view. Onthe other hand, the naturalist’s struggle is often over exactly how to preserve ourexceptionalist intuitions while, at the same time, naturally integrating the humanmind. As I note later, parallel battle lines often emerge with respect to the secondmotif.
This second motif is of human beings as interlopers in nature—the interlopermotif for short.The primary locus for this motif lies in philosophical conceptions ofagency. Here, again, the root of our ordinary notions of agency lies in experiencesof events taking place in the world around us. I wave my arm at my friend acrossa crowded room. In sympathy for the widow’s grief, we take care of the houseworkuntil she can recover from the initial shock of her loss. The poet struggles for yearson end to complete his or her masterpiece.
Such experiences are, of course, of human beings doing things. As such, theyare on a par with our experiences of any of the other doings we witness in nature:trees digging roots in the dirt, volcanoes erupting, and planets orbiting in space. Tobe sure, many human doings are unlike these others in myriad ways. Volcanoes donot erupt in sympathy with other volcanoes, trees do not dig at the dirt to make art,and planets do not orbit to catch someone’s attention. But this by itself only givesus reason to think that doings come in many flavors, not that some of these aredoings and others are not. In this sense, volcanoes, trees, and planets are just asmuch agents as we are.
Of course, we can certainly say something about the flavors in which humandoings come. That is, not only do human beings have a viewpoint on the world:More, the things we do can be expressive of it. In many of the things we do, our
4. In particular, the three brief descriptions earlier are intended to evoke forms of exception-alist lines of thought present, respectively, in Descartes’s arguments for mind/body dualism,contemporary discussions of consciousness in the wake of Tom Nagel’s classic article “What Is ItLike to Be a Bat?” and conceptions of intentionality inspired by Frege and Kant.
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viewpoints on the world make characteristic kinds of differences in it. The lessonwe can draw is that here, again, something about us is a manifestation of naturaldiversity—our doings are unlike any others we know of.
But what I am calling the interloper motif goes beyond what I have said sofar. The aforementioned observations warrant only what is warranted by ourobservations of any natural event. In contrast, in the interloper motif, we are drawntoward an image of human doings like my raising my arm, not as yet more eventsin the course of natural history but rather as ones that cannot be completelyintegrated into that history. In comparison with them—genuine doings or full-blooded actions—all other worldly doings are entirely different: “accidental hap-penings” or “mere events.”
This conception of human agency arises in two prominent philosophicalthemes in particular: intentional action and free action. In the former case, aparticular kind of event of which human actions are the paradigm is thought of ashaving a different logical architecture than any other kind of event in the world.5 Inparticular, certain features of the events that are our intentional actions are held toembody our points of view.This is what makes them things we do rather than mereevents involving our bodies. However, the descriptions we use to capture theseall-important features relate them to each other in ways that have no place innature—by relations of reason or justification. In this way, human actions arethought to stand outside nature in the very respects that make them manifestationsof our agency. They are subject to forms of explanation or inference that have noanalog in nature, or we describe them using judgments whose logical forms setthem apart from any other natural event.And so the human beings who undertakethese actions stand in a kind of logical bubble, insulated from the world aroundthem.
Likewise, when accounting for human freedom, we sometimes think ofhuman actions as miracles exempt from the causal order of nature. I am free, onthis view, because I am the subject of events of which I and I alone am the origin.As it were, I stand outside the course of history inserting events into the world fromoutside it. When taken by this image of freedom, we can think this is what thedignity and value of my action consists in—as if human action is degraded unlessit is divine, or that I am not accountable for my actions if freedom is not likethis—as if one needed to be Moses conjuring water from a stone to be an object ofpraise or blame.
As is the case with philosophical conceptions of human mind, there is ofcourse a set of problems here over which philosophers puzzle. Our exceptionalistintuitions make us seem implausibly magical, even when they seem unavoidable.And, again, philosophers frequently address this perceived dilemma by attempting
5. I have in mind, in particular, the tradition of thought about intentional action stemmingfrom Anscombe’s Intention, including especially the work of Donald Davidson and other places aswell as current work from neo-Anscombians like Michael Thompson, cf. G. E. M. Anscombe,Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Donald Davidson, Essays on Actionsand Events (New York: Clarendon Press, 2001); Michael Thompson, Life and Action: ElementaryStructures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008),especially parts I and II, “The Representation of Life” and “Naive Action Theory.”
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to reconcile its two horns.6 We try—perhaps like paranormal researchers strugglingto find a place in the periodic table for ectoplasm—to find a place in nature forwhat seem like the otherworldly forms exhibited by our actions or the other-worldly powers through which we undertake them.
Now, I suspect that many people will think that in the case of both mindand agency, the drive toward natural unity clearly must win the day. However,self-styled naturalists—especially the breed of them currently most common,physicalists—are, I will argue, frequently their own worst enemies. They frequentlyembrace a conception of what natural integration requires, which leaves themunnecessarily vulnerable to exceptionalist criticisms. It is widely presupposed, thatis, that when trying to account for the natures of things we encounter in nature, anaturalistic outlook comes at a substantial cost—that the cost of natural unity is theimpoverishment of our expressive resources. In particular, those resources will not,at least in the first instance, include the very concepts we need to account for mindand agency—that is, to articulate what is most remarkable about human life. Onthis picture, there is, at the start, a particular sort of gap between human life andnature as a whole—a conceptual one. A commitment to this gap is, of course, anecessary presupposition for the view that the gap cannot be overcome.This mightseem, at first, to be a trivial logical observation. However, in what follows, I willargue that it is not. I will first motivate the aforementioned diagnosis of physical-ism. But more than this, I will argue that this conception of natural integration isprofoundly mistaken.
2. THE PHYSICAL IMAGE OF NATURE
Consider, then, the following claim, which is of a kind frequently put forward as athesis in metaphysics: I am nothing more than so many subatomic particlesarranged in a such-and-such way. Other claims of this kind include the following:Penny the dog is nothing over and above this region of extension or the treeoutside is identical to this quantity of extension changing over time. These and likeformulae are, as I intend them to be understood, variations on physicalism, a claimof the form: Such-and-such entirely is or depends on the physical. But what kind ofview is this meant to express, and why do we find such a view attractive when wedo?
For example, should we think of physicalism as what I called naïve natural-ism? This would be a mistake. For to be a naïve naturalist about x is just to thinkthat x (e.g., a dog, a tree, a human being) is out there in nature. And so, ifphysicalism was naïve naturalism, many physicalist views might seem trivial. Physi-calists would be reduced to claiming something with which nearly everyoneagrees—at least, in “common life and conversation”: that instances of human
6. With respect to intentional action, both of the currently dominant research programs in themetaphysics of action—so-called causal theories à la Donald Davidson and neo-Anscombianrevivals of the Aristotelian conception of substantial form à la Michael Thompson—are attemptsto do just this. To my mind, exemplary instances of this strategy with regard to autonomous actioncan be found in the work of compatibilist realists about freedom and/or moral responsibility likeHarry Frankfurt, P. F. Strawson, and David Velleman.
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thought and action are to be met with in the world around us. By the same token,many anti-physicalists would be cornered into claiming that human beings arepartly outside of nature. This indicates that the identification of physicalism withnaïve naturalism fails to capture what is really going on in such controversies.
In what follows, I will suggest that making sense of physicalism requiresunderstanding the role that three notions in particular play in it: first, the notion ofnatural unity; second, the notion of natural uniformity; and third, the notion of alanguage of nature.
To begin with, at the root of physicalism’s attraction is, I believe, the drivetoward natural unity. We can see how this is so by reflecting on the appeals tophysics that—sometimes implicitly but very often explicitly—underlie the modernphilosophical notion of the physical. Why should physics occupy a privileged rolehere? Why not biology, anthropology, or geology? For that matter, why not philat-ely? Because physics, as classically conceived, is the science of nature as such. Thisis what is behind the traditional distinction between physics and the so-calledspecial sciences. While such sciences—sciences like biology, anthropology, andgeology—deal only with particular regions of nature, physics aims to understandnature as a whole. As it were, physics does not concern itself primarily with localfacts but rather with global ones. It encompasses all the special sciences in the sensethat its gaze ranges over everything that any of them brings into view. Whenphilosophers say that something is thoroughly physical, the thought is generallythat we must understand it from the point of view of physics. But to do so is simplyto view it from the point of view of its place in nature as a whole. Claiming thateverything in the world around us entirely is or depends on the physical, then, isgiving expression to the drive toward natural unity—the drive to naturally inte-grate everything we find in nature.
However, this does not yet tell us exactly what conception of natural inte-gration lies at the root of physicalism. Physicalism, as I understand it, does notmerely give expression to the drive toward natural unity. Rather, in it this drivetakes a particular form, one that has been shaped by the development of modernphysics. Here, by “physics,” I do not merely mean the science of nature as such—thescience abstractly defined in the classical conception of physics I have alreadymentioned. Rather, I mean the empirical science that is practiced in physics labo-ratories and taught in physics departments—the inheritance of early moderndevelopments in natural philosophy. Philosophers have been particularlyimpressed by a certain picture of nature that modern physics seems to have givenus—what I will call the physical image of nature.What kind of image is this? For ourpurposes, two aspects of it are significant. First, it is an image of nature as uniform.Second, it is an image of nature as uniform in particular way, which I will explainusing a notion of transcendence.
To begin with, to say that nature is uniform in the sense I have in mind is tosay that in an important respect, it is the same throughout. Namely, there is a kindof structure or organization—call it “the natural order”—which is operative every-where in nature. The notion that the order of the natural world is uniform finds itsinspiration in the fundamental role played by natural laws in the explanationscharacteristic of modern physics. An account of the most general natural laws
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precisely specifies kinds of structure or organization that pervade any and everynatural locale—planets, stars, living things, thinking things, undertakers of actions,and all the rest. It gives us a picture of nature in which its uniformities are starklyforegrounded.
However, such an account has another feature that is important for under-standing what I am calling the physical image of nature. According to this image,the uniform natural order is what I will call a transcendent one. A transcendentorder is one that, so to speak, determines ahead of time the manifestations ofnatural diversity. That is, to believe in such an order is to think that any manifes-tation of diversity—any event, kind, property, or object—shows up as an instantia-tion of possibilities already in place prior to the unfolding of natural history. Anaccount of the natural laws will, on the physical image of nature, precisely specifya transcendent order—a set of principles that govern nature and can be articulatedusing propositions that tell us what any natural phenomenon whatsoever can belike.
In the hand of metaphysicians, the physical image of nature has given rise tothe conception of natural integration at work in physicalism. On this conception, tonaturally integrate something is to understand it in terms of its place in theuniform, transcendent natural order—for example, in terms of the most generalnatural laws. We can see this conception at work in a certain use of the word“physical” quite common in contemporary metaphysics. On this use, those items(e.g., objects, kinds, and properties) are physical that would be represented usingthe repertoire of concepts employed in a “complete” or “canonical” physics, under-stood as an account of the natural laws. To understand something as thoroughlyphysical, on this use, is to understand what it is exclusively using concepts from thisrepertoire: the repertoire of so-called physical concepts.This conception of what wedo when we understand something as thoroughly physical is, in fact, the beatingheart of physicalism as a metaphysical doctrine.
To see physicalism at work, let us again consider carbon—which most wouldconsider to be something about which physicalism is uncontroversially true. Whenwe discover that carbon is something with atomic number 6—that is, whose nucleusis composed of six protons—we are thereby in a position to consider it in terms ofits place in an account of the natural order. For such an account plausibly willmention protons. More than this, it will articulate as a possibility for them that theybe combined with one another just as they are in the nuclei of carbon.
In this way, once we make this discovery, we are in a position to understandcarbon as a variation on something that is itself invariant: the transcendent naturalorder of which the kinds “proton” and “electron” are ineliminable aspects. And weare in a position to understand something about the diverse manifestations ofcarbon—for example, the various forms it takes in this or that carbon ion, thevarious ways in which it combines with other elements in compounds, and thevarious events in which it is involved. Namely, we are in a position to understandeach of these as manifestations of a single thing—that is, as different ways in whichthe career of carbon might unfold in the world. Insofar as our discovery allows usto comprehend the unity of carbon and its unity with the rest of nature, we havenaturally integrated carbon.
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It is important to remember, though, that the physicalist about carbon goesbeyond the observations just made about it. She does not simply wish to say that weunderstand carbon better when we discover that it has atomic number 6.This muchis undeniable. Rather, he or she is trying to tell us what the correct account ofcarbon’s nature—of what it fundamentally is—must look like.
We can capture the commitments of the physicalist’s conception of anynatural being’s nature in the following way: the language of nature is physicallanguage. What, though, do I mean by a “language of nature?” The word “nature”here is to be understood in both of the ways I have been using it so far—todesignate both the world around us in its entirety (nature) and the natures of thethings in it. That is, to call a repertoire of concepts the language of nature is to saythat we can use them to both capture what it is to be any particular natural beingand articulate the unity among natural phenomena. When we are gripped byphysicalism about some x, the drive toward natural unity takes a particular form: aconviction that the language of nature is the one we use to articulate the uniform,transcendent natural order. Such a language employs all and only physical con-cepts. In other words, it is physical language.
For someone who accepts this restriction on the language of nature, what,then, becomes of the claims we make about natural beings like carbon, trees, orhuman beings using concepts that are not physical ones in the foregoing sense? Letus first consider one classical approach: reductive physicalism. For the reductivephysicalist, when dealing with facts represented by such claims, we are faced withthe task of, so to speak, recovering them using physical concepts. In other words, weare faced with the task of undertaking reductions: for example, of claims thatemploy nonphysical concepts to claims which employ only physical ones or of theitems designated by nonphysical concepts to items designated by physical ones.
The reductive physicalist about carbon, for example, will say that carbon isnothing but a substance with atomic number 6—insert here whatever descriptionusing physical concepts seems appropriate. And this is because when we describeit using such concepts, we capture what unifies it with the rest of nature—the factthat it exhibits kinds of structure or order present everywhere in nature.
Now, putting carbon aside, reductive physicalism about our targetphenomenon—human life—is no longer a widespread view. However, it offers usthe most clear-cut example of an attempt to satisfy—and in the most direct waypossible—the demands that physicalists feel the force of quite generally: (1) tounderstand the natures of natural beings as dependent on their unity with every-thing else in nature and (2) to do this by achieving semantic rapprochementbetween our descriptions of nature as a whole our and accounts of the natures ofdiscrete phenomena.
There are other (and currently more common) ways of trying to satisfy thistwo-part demand: for example, supervenience-based forms of physicalism, whichposit forms of dependence weaker than identity. And there are different concep-tions of the language of nature—the language with which a rapprochement must beachieved: for example, conceptions in which we include in the language of natureconceptual apparatus, not simply from the empirical science of physics, but alsofrom other natural sciences. We will have occasion later to discuss forms of physi-
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calism weaker than the reductive variety, but for the moment, my suggestion is thatboth ways of “liberalizing” physicalism are nevertheless vulnerable to the three-step diagnosis I have offered. That is, they are still ways of attempting to satisfyboth (1) and (2)—albeit on the basis of less austere interpretations of the con-straints imposed thereby.
Of course, even taking into account more liberal forms of physicalism, I donot claim that absolutely every view that calls itself physicalism can be diagnosedin the aforementioned way. But I do believe I have articulated something funda-mental about why it is so attractive to claim that something in the world around usis—or depends for its nature on what is—thoroughly physical: why, in fact, claimslike this can seem—especially given the vision of physics that emerges in themodern period—absolutely unavoidable. To deny that something that is clearly tobe met with in nature (a planet, a tree, a human being) is or depends on the physicalcan seem like embracing the existence of supernatural carbon described earlier:like a failure to go the distance and put in the difficult work necessary to naturallyintegrate this being.
What, then, could explain the fact that physicalism has so manydiscontents—in particular, physicalism about human life? This is what I will addressnext.
3. NATURAL UNIFORMITY AND IMPOVERISHED DESCRIPTIONS
I claimed earlier that to be a physicalist about some phenomenon is not merely toclaim that it can be understood better when it is described using physical concepts.Likewise, the denial of physicalism about some subject matter does notnecessarily—and most frequently does not actually—amount to the denial that athing can be understood better when it is situated in the uniform, transcendentnatural order. Rather, most often, its starting point lies in the denial that we cancapture—or fully capture—this subject matter’s nature when we describe it exclu-sively using those terms that make clear its place in that order. When we describecertain phenomena, the thought goes, using only physical concepts—in particular,human mind, or agency—we impoverish our descriptive capacities so much thatthe natures of those phenomena are lost, and with them, the exceptional characterof human life itself.
One form in which such worries have brewed in recent philosophy has beenusing what may be called döppelganger scenarios. A classical variation on thedöppelganger scenario, due to Donald Davidson, is Swampman.7 In it, we imagine
7. Cf.Donald Davidson’s“Knowing One’s Own Mind,” in Subjective, Intersubjective,Objective(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15–38. Particularly interesting uses of Swampman andsimilar döppelganger scenarios (e.g., Twin Earth scenarios and zombies) in the service of aninvestigation into the natures of things and their place in the natural world are Hilary Putnam’s“TheMeaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Mind, Language and Reality; Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–71; Tyler Burge’s articles work on anti-individualism,particularly “Individualism and the Mental,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4(1) (1979): 73–122;Dominik Sklenar’s Being of a Kind (unpublished dissertation,UCLA,1997);Ned Block’s“TroublesWith Functionalism,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1, ed. Ned Block
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that a physical replica of a human being—say, Davidson himself—is created by alightning bolt striking a tree in a swamp. Davidson dies, and Swampman replaceshim. He (or rather it) moves about in the world just as Davidson would, foolingeveryone it meets into thinking it is Davidson.
What purposes could be served by reflecting on such a strange scenario—which might very well be in the strongest sense impossible? The Swampmanthought experiment and similar döppelganger scenarios have been used, in a widevariety of contexts, to limn the boundaries of this or that form of physicaldescription—in particular, of forms of physical description for human beings. Thatis, it has been used to pose questions like the following: can what is most excep-tional about human life—those aspects of ourselves that we take to be central towhat we are—be captured, as the reductive physicalist would have it, using onlyphysical concepts? Could it even completely depend, as the less demandingsupervenience-based physicalist would have it, on the items (particulars, kinds,properties) we represent using physical language? Could Swampman (or some-thing like it) be a human being in all those respects that we take to be central towhat they are, or could its existence only be a dim shadow of human life?
Using such scenarios, this kind of question has been asked about all of thephilosophical themes concerning mind and agency we saw in the two exceptionalistmotifs. In fact, the worries that philosophers have sometimes expressed using thesescenarios are exemplary cases of both. For example, with respect to the subjectmatter of mind, variations on scenarios like Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth thoughtexperiment and Davidson’s Swampman case have been used to question whetherthe intentional relations to phenomena required for thought can be captured usingthis or that mode of physical description. Or philosophers have wondered whetherthere would be anything it would be like to be a purely physical duplicate of ahuman being—whether, in the philosophical jargon, zombies would have con-sciousness.8 In both cases, we find a worry playing itself out through the use ofdöppelganger cases—namely, that physical descriptions are insufficient for captur-ing the hallmarks of human mindedness.
Similar metaphysical worries have spawned a great deal of discussion in thephilosophy of human agency. For example, inquiries into the nature of humanaction are often posed at the outset using a question formulated by Wittgenstein:“what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raisemy arm?”9 Often, this is used as a way of posing the question: What is it that
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 268–305; David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind:In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and MichaelThompson (op. cit.).
8. The notion of a zombie (as the term is used in contemporary discussions of consciousness)has its deep origins, of course, in Descartes’s claim that my body by itself is like an automaton—abeing whose workings are thoroughly mechanical and quite literally mindless. However, thecontemporary notion itself traces back to reflections by Saul Kripke in Lecture III of Naming andNecessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) and has been developed fruitfully inthe work of philosophers like David Chalmers.
9. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973),§621. It should be noted that Wittgenstein perhaps thought this is ultimately a misguided way ofposing questions about the character of human action.
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distinguishes human actions—for example, things I do intentionally—from “meremovements of molecules” or “mere bodily events?”
What makes this kind of question seem pressing is the sense that for humanactions to be just more motions of molecules—events comprehensible using onlythe concepts with which we make sense of any event in nature—is not enough.Theworry here is that the sense in which we can do things must involve something morethan the sense in which volcanoes, trees, and other natural beings do things.Something must be added to a mere physical event for it to be genuine humanaction—for example, to embody my viewpoint and the normative commitmentsthereof.10 Otherwise, it is a mere döppelganger of human action.
Such worries show up in a different form when we turn to debates about freeaction, which are frequently driven by a question like “How can I be the origin ofmy actions even while they are imbedded in a natural history whose order asdescribed by physics is a causal one?” What makes this question intelligible is theworry that we cannot—that when we think of an action as something imbedded innatural history, we no longer consider it as something I freely do. From the point ofview of the physical image of nature, our actions are not things we genuinely do butrather mere physical replicas of free actions—just one damn thing happening afteranother.11
Here, again, we might of course complain that volcanoes and trees—whosenatures we are more likely to concede can be understood using physical conceptsalone—are the origins of their doings in a quite ordinary sense: volcanoes of theireruptions and trees of their root diggings. But this is unlikely to satisfy someonegripped by the worries about free action that motivate the present question. Forhim or her, the sense in which volcanoes are the origins of their eruptions and treesof their root diggings must be categorically different—not just different in itsparticulars—from that in which I am the origin of the things I do freely. For
10. Here, I mean to reference Anscombe’s famously dark and rich discussion of intentionalaction in §§19–20 of Intention. Although I will not argue for this here, I believe, however, thatAnscombe’s arguments concerning intentional action are perhaps just as driven by exceptionalistworries as are the views she has in mind to attack. At the very least, this is true of certain recentattempts to develop her reflections—for example, in Michael Thompson’s “Naive Action Theory”(cf. Thompson op. cit.). Thompson’s project with regard to action is to argue that we can and mustadd to the mere motions of molecules something akin to Aristotelian substantial form as schema-tized in certain forms of explanation and logical forms of judgment—in Thompson’s way ofspeaking, the “form of human life”—in order to account for what it is for molecular motionsto acquire the status of intentional actions. Such forms cannot be accounted for in physical terms:The latter only allow us to countenance an intentional action (as well as, more generally, livingorganisms and many events in which they are involved) as “a mere congeries of physical particles”(Thompson, p. 60). I will develop these arguments in a future work, tentatively entitled “ThreeGrades of Practical Cartesianism.”
11. The best summations of this kind of worry I know of—although ones that characterizethem in a very different way than I have—are due to Tom Nagel, cf, especially the chapter entitled“Autonomy” in The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and his“Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24–38. Thelocus classicus, to my mind, for attempts to understand the conditions for free action in a way thatputs aside this kind of metaphysical worry is P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” inFreedom and Resentment and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–28.
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example, to be free, I must, in some way, be exempt from a fundamental aspect ofthe natural order—the fact that it is a causal one.
By now, I hope it is clear that the worries that guide such uses of döppel-ganger scenarios are instances of the spectator and interloper motifs discussedearlier. In each case, philosophical debate is driven by the worry that human beings,insofar as they are agents with minds, cannot be inhabitants of nature on a par withany other. And this is because although physical language is adequate for describ-ing most of nature, it provides only an impoverished language for describing us.Talk of mere physical duplicates in these contexts means something like satisfiersof physical descriptions, where the word “physical” is to be understood as markingoff those concepts with which we understand the order of nature as a whole. Andso when we confine our accounts of human nature to descriptions using physicallanguage, what is most exceptional about the phenomenon of human life is lostfrom view. Again, in none of these cases are philosophers worrying that physicallanguage can tell us nothing illuminating about human life but rather that it doesnot allow us to say enough.
Again, I do not claim that absolutely every exceptionalist view in metaphys-ics can be diagnosed in the way I have just done. However, the foregoing discussionphysicalism and its discontents does, I believe, capture something fundamentalabout the contemporary conversation about naturalism. It captures, in particular,why it has seemed so clear to many philosophers that to take a position vis-à-visnaturalism about a subject matter—for example, the human mind—is to situateoneself on a certain spectrum of views at one end of which is reductive physicalismand at the other end of which is full-blown dualism. When we conceive the rangeof views available to us in this way, we have traveled quite a ways away from naïvenaturalism. What gives this strange new dialectical terrain its shape?
The picture I have sketched of the two drives provides us with an answer. Inone corner, we have the drive toward natural unity, taking here a very particularform—viz the thesis that the language of nature is physical language. Armed withthis thesis, we are led to think that in order to embrace a naturalistic outlook wemust describe all natural phenomena as they are described in the physical image ofnature—that is, using only the expressive resources available to us in physicallanguage. In the other corner, we have the drive toward human exceptionalism,nourished to varying extents by this thesis. The various views to be found on thespectrum between reductive physicalism and dualism emerge from the encounterbetween these two combatants. When the former gives no ground, we are led toreductive physicalism; when the latter does, we are led to dualism. In between, wefind many other views, for example, supervenience-based forms of physicalism,which preserve the distinctness of minds, mental states, and/or mental propertieswhile maintaining their dependence on the human being’s place in nature. Ofcourse, reductive physicalism, dualism, supervenience-based physicalism—theseviews are often in competition with one another. However, they compete on ashared terrain generated by the notion that the cost of natural integration is theimpoverishment of the language of nature.
But does natural integration really come at this cost? In the concludingsection of this article, I will argue that it does not. Neither a commitment to natural
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unity nor even to natural uniformity requires that we impoverish our expressiveresources as the physicalist does. So neither commitment leads us inevitably to thestand-off between physicalism and its exceptionalist discontents. For this reason, Ibelieve that both are misguided. I will argue that this is so by describing andmotivating an alternative view that embraces both natural unity and natural uni-formity without leading us to either end—pluralistic monism.
4. PLURALISTIC MONISM AND THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE
I will try to make clear the view I have in mind by considering how it interprets thethree notions I claimed earlier are at work in the motivations for physicalism—thelanguage of nature, natural uniformity, and natural unity.
First, the pluralistic monist understands the language of nature in a muchdifferent way than does the physicalist. For the pluralistic monist, that is, thelanguage of nature is not physical language; rather, it is simply ordinary language.What do I mean by this? On this conception, any of the concepts we use whenexpressing any truth about a being in nature is a part of the language of nature. Infact, the pluralistic monist holds something even stronger: Every such truth is itselfamong the things we will say when deploying the language of nature.
Thus, for example, the concepts we use to express the truths of biology,anthropology, psychology, and geology are components of the language ofnature. Because the pluralistic monist thinks this is true, for his or her biology,anthropology—indeed any of the natural sciences—are just as much physics, on theclassical conception, as the scientific project of discovering the most generalnatural laws. That is, for the pluralistic monist, all of the foregoing sciences aresciences of nature as such. The truths delivered to us by these sciences, then, countjust as much as physical truths as any of the propositions given to us by scientistsworking in physics departments are; and the concepts used in the propositions ofthose sciences are just as much physical concepts as those employed in specifica-tions of the most general natural laws.
Now, despite physicalism’s grounding in the physical image of nature deliv-ered to us by the modern empirical science of physics, this much would be acceptedby a wide range of physicalists. However, the pluralistic monist is committed tosomething much stronger than this. Namely, she thinks any truth concerning beingsin the world around us are just as much truths of physics—of the science of natureas such—as any of the propositions of any natural science. This includes thepropositions by means of which we describe the ordinary manifestations of agencyand mind that we witness in the world around us. That I am perceiving somekatydids, that there is something it is like for this to be so, that I am thinking abouttheir lovely green color and deliberating about how I might get a photo of them,that I am acting when I slowly take my camera phone out and point it in theirdirection—all of these are truths of physics. And so all of the concepts and termsused therein are part of the language of nature. In other words, the pluralisticmonist does not aim to simply liberalize restrictions on the language of nature—say, beyond those limits honored in the most austere forms of physicalism. Rather,she rejects the need for any restrictions whatsoever.
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But how could ordinary language be the language of nature? There aretwo questions that must be addressed here, corresponding to the two criteria forbeing a language of nature—namely, that it be a language with which we specifythe nature of any natural being and specify the unity to be found among naturalphenomena.
First, why think that the language by which we specify the nature of a naturalbeing includes all the concepts we use to express truths about it? We can answerthis question by reflecting on the pluralistic monist’s stronger commitment.We canask: how could something’s nature include all of the facts about it?12 There is a starkdifference here between pluralistic monism and many traditional views aboutnature or essence. Traditionally, the truths that tell us what a thing’s nature is are,or are subclasses of, the necessary truths about it.13 For the pluralistic monist, incontrast, a natural being’s nature is not exhausted by its necessities. Quite thecontrary: Any truth about it pertains to its nature. For example, that I am humanpertains to my nature. But that I have black hair, read philosophy, and have aquarter in my pocket pertain to my nature as well.
Now, the pluralistic monist thinks this, not on general grounds (e.g., atheory according to which a thing’s nature is what explains its conditions ofindividuation), but rather on grounds provided by the demands of natural inte-gration. To naturally integrate a thing is to understand it, not in isolation—forexample, as a logical subject of predication to be related at a later stage to otherbeings—but so to speak as one location at which the history of the natural worldunfolds. What it is, in other words, is inseparable from its place in nature asa whole. The pluralistic monist understands this claim quite directly: when,as natural integrators, we fix our gaze on some particular locale—a particularnatural phenomenon—and try to understand its nature, our aim is to understandwhat nature is like at this locale.
When we consider what it would take to fully understand something’s placein nature in this sense, any of the truths about it play a role. In fact, this is exactlyhow we treat natural beings when we do natural science. Of course, because ourscientific knowledge is, at any given stage, quite limited, not all facts about a naturalbeing necessarily strike us as illuminating, so that we think that some of themcan go unheeded in our scientific accounts. For example, it might seem momentous
12. My answer to this question owes a great deal to a series of articles from Sarah Coolidge,material from which will appear in her forthcoming dissertation From Concept to Cosmos as wellas to discussions leading up to an article I have coauthored with her and Joseph Almog: “Lifewithout Essence: Man as a Force of Nature” (forthcoming in Perspectives in Metaphysics fromOxford University Press), as well as to conversations with Andrew Hsu about the notion ofsomething’s nature in Spinoza and Wittgenstein. The original inspiration for these thoughts lay inJoseph Almog’s highly suggestive claim that for Spinoza, the nature of x is nature (the naturalworld as a whole) at x.Almog develops his interpretation of Spinoza’s view that natural beings arefinite modes of substance/God/nature.
13. A classic discussion of essence that proceeds according to the former interpretation—being-a-necessity-of-x as necessary and sufficient for being part of x’s essence—is Saul Kripke’sNaming and Necessity. An example of the view that x’s essence contains some but not all of thethings that are necessarily true of it can be found in Kit Fine’s “Essence and Modality,” Philo-sophical Perspectives 8 (1994): 1–16.
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that I am human but trivial that I have two quarters in my pocket. Further, anyparticular investigation of nature concerns itself with a relatively small number ofquestions, and so we attend to a limited set of facts about a thing to answer thequestions we want to answer. Thus, if we are psychologists asking questions abouthuman cognition, it might seem momentous that I can do arithmetic but trivial thatI have black hair.
However, both of these observations concern ways in which the task ofnatural integration is being tackled by finite creatures who cannot take a God’s-eyeview on the world—we human beings.14 The spirit of scientific inquiry, though, is tothink that at the end of the day, every fact about a natural being is relevant forunderstanding what it is. Scientists are those strange folks who burrow into thingsand concern themselves with facts about them that in everyday life can seemtrivial. And this is, I suggest, because they are guided by the conviction that thoseaspects of a thing with which we normally concern ourselves are always alreadyinsufficient for a full understanding of what it really is—of what nature is like here.Scientific investigation can only, of course, broaden our view to a finite extent. Butthe ideal it aims to approach—even though it is one that cannot be attained—is tohave nature as a whole in view with complete clarity.
We are now in a position to see one crucial way in which pluralisticmonism differs from physicalism in its various guises. For example, the pluralisticmonist rejects the demand—embraced by reductive physicalism—to undertakereductions. That is, we need not try to recover important truths about a naturalphenomenon by reducing them to other truths or by reducing the items desig-nated in those truths to other items. For if we embrace her view, we need nottake one subset of the concepts we use to express truths about a natural being tobe the only concepts we can use to capture its nature, and we need not takeone set of properties, kinds, and the like to be the only ones that pertain to itsnature.
Now, when I say that the pluralistic monist rejects the need for reductions, Ido not mean to say she rejects identity truths. Some of the truths we discover aboutnatural beings are undoubtedly identity truths: that Hesperus is Phosphorus, thatwater is H2O, and so on. But for the pluralistic monist, none of these by itself givesus the nature of something: a kind of nice, neat metaphysical formula for what it is.Rather, each is simply another truth about it—one that is added to the stock oftruths we build up in order to understand better what it is.
A similar point can be extended to other, nonreductive forms of physicalism.For example, pluralistic monism does not entail the falsehood of any claims to thedependence relations prized by supervenience-based physicalists anymore than ofthe identity claims prized by reductive physicalists. It is simply that such depen-dence relations do not, for the pluralistic monist, have the special significance theyare often taken to have. Of course, she does take dependence truths—for example,concerning the dependence of one property or state (say, a so-called mental one)on another (say, a so-called physical property or state)—to pertain to the natures
14. This, as I see it, is one of crucial lessons of Spinoza’s discussion in Letter 32, “The Wormin the Blood,” in Complete Works, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 842–51.
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of things. But again, this is simply because she takes any truths about natural beingsto pertain to their nature.
What about the second criterion for being the language of nature? That is,how could ordinary language be the language with which we specify the unitythere is among natural phenomena? Earlier, I claimed that the physicalist’srestriction of the language of nature to physical concepts has a dual motivation.First, the language of nature is—at least in the first instance—restricted to thoseconcepts necessary for specifying the uniform order of nature. Second, the physi-calist understands that order as a transcendent one: an order of natural invari-ances (say, of natural laws) that determines what any natural phenomenon canbe like.
In contrast, the pluralistic monist understands the order of nature to be whatI will call an immanent order. To understand the relevant notion of immanence,consider again how the pluralistic monist understands the spirit in which naturalintegrators examine any particular natural being. Trying to understand any suchbeing—me, this bit of carbon, that tree—is trying to understand the natural worldat some particular location therein.We can illustrate this thought using an analogy.A fact about what I am like at a particular place and time—for example, that I washungry this morning—is a fact about me simpliciter. It is, in particular, a fact aboutme right now. Likewise, a fact about what nature is like at any particular locationtherein is a fact about nature as such. It is in this sense that for the pluralisticmonist, nature contains structural invariances, and thus, is uniform. Every factabout a natural being is a fact about what nature is like everywhere. It is true ofnature here and now on earth that it contains Alpha Centauri and true of nature atAlpha Centauri that it contains me here on earth.
Now, we are sometimes wont to think that facts like the two just mentionedrepresent a kind of second-class truth. What I have said, it might be complained,amounts to saying, for example, that Alpha Centauri is such that I exist. But this,one might think, is a truth borne out of the games we can play with the toolsafforded to us by formal logic—a mere “Cambridge property” that says nothing ofreal substance about Alpha Centauri itself.
The pluralistic monist can respond that a confusion is at work in this objec-tion. First of all, this objection misconstrues the force of the claim she ismaking—which is not that Alpha Centauri, considered in isolation, is such that Iexist, but rather irreducibly concerns nature as a whole. True, when we considerAlpha Centauri, finite creatures that we are, we are often forced to attend only tofacts about it that manifest themselves when we look in its direction. But asscientists of nature fixed on understanding nature as such, this confinement of ourattention is in the service of understanding nature as a whole. And the existenceof me—or any other human being—is crucial for understanding Alpha Centauri’splace therein.
For example, the carbon that is caught up in the carbon-nitrogen-oxygencycles by means of which Alpha Centauri produces the inferno of radiation it emitsis the very same carbon that in me is caught up in vital processes, actions, andthought. And these facts—that carbon here in this distant star is one and the samecarbon that makes possible something so strikingly different—human life, action,
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and mind—is of paramount importance.15 We sometimes overlook this to defendmetaphysical hobby horses—say, a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic prop-erties through which we can cling to the intelligibility of considering beings inisolation from each other. But such hobby horses are, I suggest, very distant fromthe project of natural integration.
How, then, does the pluralistic monist understand the invariance, uniformity,and unity of nature differently from the physicalist? The physicalist, she will say,fixates on one class of natural invariances to the exclusion of another. For thepluralistic monist, that is, any fact about any natural being is what we can call aninvariance fact—a fact about the structural invariances of nature, and thus one thattells us a way in which nature is uniform.
But there are two kinds of invariance facts—what I will call locally mani-fested facts and globally manifested facts. We can illustrate this distinction byconsidering the following example. It is true of me that I have a heart. But this isnot a fact that needs be manifest when we, for example, look into my skull.Nevertheless, it is true of the very thing we are looking at when we look into myskull—namely me—that it has a heart. Now, it is also true of me that I am made ofmolecules. But in contrast to my having a heart, this is something that is true of methrough and through: No matter what bit of me you look at, you will find moleculesthere.
Analogously, a locally manifested fact concerns what nature is like every-where.But the fact that it is true of nature here—atAlpha Centauri—that it containsme need not be manifest when we are looking at Alpha Centauri. A globallymanifested fact, in contrast, is something true of nature through and through—it ismanifested at every natural locale. The kinds of order or structure specified by themost general natural laws, for example, are globally manifested facts. Every naturalphenomenon whatsoever manifests the kind of order they specify. This is justanother way of saying that each acts in accordance with those laws.
Now, the physicalist takes globally manifested facts to be the only ones thatpertain to understanding the uniform natural order. From the perspective of thepluralist monist, this ignores the natural invariances that are only manifestedlocally—which are equally facts about nature as such. This is perhaps understand-able. We begin as students of nature baffled by its vast diversity. For all we can tell,it can seem like a chaotic disarray of phenomena. To quell this sense, we look forsomething to hold the seeming disarray together. As we investigate nature, wediscover more and more facts about it that manifest themselves everywhere welook. As these discoveries become increasingly sophisticated, we canonize suchinvariances in more and more general natural laws and principles. In them, we findsomething to settle our unease—a set of facts philosophers frequently take to havea special metaphysical status—that is, to constitute an abstract order that gatherstogether the diversity of nature by fixing prior to the unfolding of its history whatany natural phenomenon can be.
15. The foregoing observations grew out of conversations with Christopher Frey and out ofthinking about his article “From Blood to Flesh: Homonymy, Unity, and Ways of Being in Aristo-tle” (unpublished manuscript).
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The pluralist monist, in contrast, takes our starting point as knowers merelyas a necessary artifact of our finite minds. That is, for her, there is no disarray togather together—only the appearance thereof. Thus, while she takes the very samefacts as the physicalist to reveal to her the structure and order of nature as such, shelooks to much else besides. In particular, she looks to the very facts that inspiredthe sense of disarray to begin with.
Now, I said earlier that the pluralist monist retains a commitment, not just toinvariance and uniformity in nature but also to natural unity. The differencebetween her and the physicalist is that while the latter thinks that natural unifor-mity engenders natural unity, the pluralist monist thinks that natural unity engen-ders natural uniformity. For her, the physicalist’s view smacks of an importantmistake: a way of mistaking an epistemic order for an ontological one. Epistemicallyspeaking, we begin with knowledge of locally manifested facts and work our way toglobally manifested ones. But since, as I noted earlier, the latter ease the worriesabout natural unity with which we begin as knowers, we can easily think that theyare—in the order of things—that which unites the diversity of nature. In contrast,the pluralistic monist takes this to be an artifact of the epistemic path we need totake in the face of seeming disunity in nature. And because of this, she takes boththe facts that the physicalist takes to be transcendent and those that are undeniablyimmanent to manifest the unity of nature.
It is not quite right to say that in doing so, she rejects the physical image ofnature. By itself, this image is simply a description of nature, provided by theempirical science of physics, in which globally manifested facts are foregroundedfor the sake of certain explanatory demands. Her quip is not with the deliverancesof physics, natural science in general, or indeed any truth-discovering practice.Rather, it is with a certain perceived demand—inspired by the physical image ofnature, yes, but cooked up by philosophers: to restrict the range of facts throughwhich the unity and organization of nature are manifested—and consequently, therange of concepts included in the language of nature.
So far, I have motivated pluralistic monism and argued that it is a view onwhich nature is unified, uniform, and pervaded by invariant structures, and thus,that none of these notions lead us inevitably to physicalism. Having done so, I willreturn to the theme of human exceptionalism. For I also claimed that none of thesenotions must inspire the exceptionalist reactions to physicalism I have discussed.To see this, we need only ask the question of where pluralistic monism will lead uswhen we concern ourselves with the nature of human life.
On reflection, it is evident that the view does not admit of the exceptionalistworries that react to physicalism. On its conception of the language of nature, suchworries cannot get a grip. For something need only be true about us to pertain toour nature. And, of course, such truths include all those that are expressive of theexceptional features of us that physicalists sometimes suggest we overlook orreduce. Human beings deliberate and perceive; there is something it is like forthem to undergo many episodes in their lives. Human beings act; many of thoseactions are ripe for moral evaluation, many are not. In many such actions, they arehindered, obstructed, prevented from being who they really take themselves orwould like to be; in others, they are none of these things or none to an intolerable
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degree. The pluralistic monist does not look on any of these things we take to betrue about ourselves with a skeptical eye. And this is because her desire to under-stand our place in nature does not, by itself, lead her to think that we must abandonany of the concepts or terms we use to express truths about human life.
I noted earlier that for the pluralistic monist, identities are never to beunderstood as reductions—identity claims designed to herd our thinking toward anelite set of concepts at the expense of others; or to one set of items designated bythose concepts at the expense of others. And so she can happily embrace the verykinds of claims that fill the exceptionalist with apprehension. I am nothing morethan this whizzing system of subatomic particles. Perceiving is nothing over andabove the occurrence of certain processes in my physical body. This event of myarm raising is this event of my arm’s rising—no more, no less. But again, for thepluralistic monist, none of these is a reduction. I do not say anything more when Iaffirm them than I do when I say that the morning star is nothing over and abovethe evening star—that it is the evening star, no more, no less.
Likewise, pluralistic monism casts a different light on the dependence rela-tions so important for defenses of supervenience-based forms of physicalism. Suchviews typically represent attempts to find a “halfway house” between natural unityand human exceptionalism. On the one hand, as I have noted earlier, they seem tosatisfy the demand for natural integration—for example, for the nature of a mentalstate to depend on its place in nature. On the other hand, insofar as they hold backfrom espousing the identity claims put forward by reductive physicalists, theynevertheless retain for human life a certain kind of autonomy—not complete, butautonomy nevertheless—from nature.
However, such dependence-amidst-nonidentity relations do not have thissignificance for the pluralistic monist. For example, for her, demonstrating thathaving mental property M depends on having so-called physical property P doesnot in any special sense secure natural integration for M or for the things thatpossess it—any more than the absence of such dependence would secure exemp-tion from nature for M. Neither does M’s numerical distinctness from P secure itsautonomy from nature—anymore than its numerical identity with P would securenatural integration for it. Pluralistic monism is not a position midway betweenreductive physicalism and human exceptionalism. Rather, it lies outside this spec-trum of views entirely. Attaching such significance to identity, nonidentity, depen-dence, lack of dependence, etc. relies on accepting the very kind of thesis thatpluralistic monism rejects: that the language of nature is physical language—ormore generally, that it must be impoverished in comparison with ordinary lan-guage. For the pluralistic monist, the language of nature includes the full repertoireof whatever conceptual or linguistic resources we need to express truths aboutbeings we encounter in the world around us.
For these reasons, the commitments to unity, uniformity, and invariance thatseem so crucial for the work of natural integration lead us inevitably to neitherphysicalism nor to the forms of exceptionalism by which we try preserve ourconvictions about human beings. One of the things that I believe can be seen in thedebate between physicalism and its discontents is something that plays itself out inmany philosophical contexts. That is, we tend to think that natural integration and
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the natural unity it reveals can only be achieved at the expense of robbing us of ourexpressive resources—especially those by means of which we understand our-selves.
One tendency I think is at work here is that at various stages of humanknowledge, we find ourselves armed with scientific tools (concepts, principles,methods of investigation) that seem so powerful to reveal to us so much about theworld that we are gripped by the thought that we must try to say everything thereis to say about nature—including everything there is to say about us—using thosetools. For example, this kind of ambition was surely felt by philosophers in theseventeenth century, who stood in the wake of (and in many cases, helped create)titanic shifts in our understanding of the natural world. But more than this, we areattached to an image of ourselves as outsiders to the nature, strangers who do notquite fit in, and this image draws us away from our default naïve naturalism.
Adopting the pluralistic monism I have outlined, I believe, returns us back tothat naturalism. At first, this might seem like a paradoxical claim. After all, plural-istic monism is a view that tackles metaphysical themes at the largest scale. But infact, I believe that in it, lofty metaphysical ambition coincides with naïve natural-ism. For such naturalism is that attitude in which we look at the things in the worldaround us and innocently take whatever we find to be a genuine revelation aboutnature and how it hangs together. In any case, I hope to have shown that pluralisticmonism offers us one promising route toward resisting the exceptionalist tenden-cies in us that at the end of the day anyone committed to natural integration mustresist.
