The Nature of the Subject & the Subject of Nature

Instructor: Daniel Sacilotto Date & Time: Saturdays, October 24, 31, November 7, 14, 21, December, 5. 12, 19 14:00 - 16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This seminar probes the vexed relationship between nature and subjectivity across the history of philosophy, from antiquity to the present. More precisely, we shall examine how by thinking about these two concepts, philosophy articulates two theses that often appear in dramatic tension with each other; on the one hand, the thesis of the continuity between nature and the subject; on the other hand, the thesis of the uniqueness of the subject in the order of nature. The Seminar focuses on the concomitant problems and controversies that emerge when one attempts to either assimilate one term into another or make the two terms autonomous. The first Session details the historical background underlying this complex issue of nature versus subject across different epochs of thought. In the second Session, we begin by attending to Aristotle’s account of the formation of the “ethical character” in the Nichomachean Ethics, which essentially associates human subjectivity with practical wisdom, and the latter with a kind of “second nature.” Attesting to this second nature requires expanding notions causation beyond the realm of natural law, so that, rather than localizing the rational kernel of the subject outside of nature in a kind of supernaturalism or reducing the latter to natural, such an account proposes to amplify our conception of nature and causation, to accommodate the practical life of thinking beings within it. In the third Session, we see how philosophical modernity recodes this problematic in various epistemological and metaphysical attempts to coordinate the concepts of mind and body: (1) Descartes’ substance dualist account of the cogito and extension; (2) Spinoza’s coordination of a property dualism of extension and thinking, and a substance monism that distinguishes between nature as self- determined or productive (natura naturans) and as derivative or produced (natura naturata); (3) Kant’s transcendental idealist attempt to assimilate nature to subjectivity in his account of representational cognition, and his simultaneous separation of nature as representation and the real as unrepresentable; (4) Schelling’s attempt to coordinate thinking and being by way of transcendental materialism that supplements and undercuts the skeptical and idealist consequences of critical philosophy. In the fourth Session we look at two attempts to reincorporate subject into nature at end of the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century, by proposing a “genealogical critique of Enlightenment rationality” (as Brandom calls it) that erodes the rational kernel of the human will, and voluntarist conceptions of the subject: the Freudian psychoanalytic account of the unconscious as unearthing a domain of bare subpersonal drives beneath the affordances of deliberative cognition; (2) the Marxian materialist transvaluation of the idealist dialectic, diagnosing suprapersonal structural relations that underlie psychologistic intentions and individual-collective decision making procedures, and its attempt to distinguish between the relation of thinking and being in the “two theses of materialism”; (3) Heidegger’s historicist attempt to undermine both the concept of subjectivity and nature that characterize the scientific impetus of the modern age as determined by ossified metaphysical biases that distort our notions both thinking and being, carries from Greek times. In the fifth Session, we focus on Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images of man in the world, in the context of thinking of a speculative anthropology that details man’s self-conception in its relation to the natural world. As we shall see, Sellars’ distinction between the “images” corresponds to two ways of articulating the bind between causes and reasons or more precisely, between the order of causal regularities, which understands man as a complex physical system, and the logical space of reasons which understands man within the framework of ‘persons.’ While Sellars follows Kant’s understanding of cognition as a normative structure, we shall argue, he also follows Aristotle’s idea that our concept of nature and naturalism must be amplified to include subjectivity within our scientific worldview. In the sixth Session, we attend to how Sellars’ “naturalism with a normative turn” (O’Shea) gives way to the divide two divergent orientations of thought: first, so-called “left Sellarsians” avow Sellars’ normative account of thinking but take issue with his naturalism, and those “right Sellarsians” that avow the naturalist thesis of integrating man into nature, but take issue with the naturalist views. As an example of the former orientation, we focus on how John McDowell proposes to rehabilitate Aristotle’s distinction between first and second nature in his magnum opus Mind and World, to declare the necessity of incorporating normativity into our conceptions of nature to avoid the perils of both a “bald naturalism” that fails to account for subjectivity, and of a “rampant Platonism” that reifies subjectivity metaphysically in dualist or idealist key. As an example of the second orientation, we focus on Paul and Patricia Churchland’s proposal for an “eliminativist materialism” that reduces the framework of persons and intentionality to the domain of causes within a neurobiological register, thereby collapsing norms onto nature. In the seventh Session, we see how more recently many thinkers have sought to find new conciliatory paths that between a naturalism that reduces subjectivity to the causal order, and a normativism that places subjectivity beyond nature altogether. We focus on two such attempts. First, Joseph Rouse’s Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image, which follows the Sellarsian attempt to amplify our conceptions of nature so as to account for the normativity of thought, without thereby indulging in reductionism, tracing a diagonal across the debates in the philosophy of mind, and heeding to recent advances in contemporary life sciences. Second, Adrian Johnson’s synthetic work Second Natures in Dappled Worlds, which attempts to problematize the very normativist conception of subjectivity that describes the latter as a rational being as much as the mechanistic view of nature that describes causal laws as reducible to efficient mechanisms, drawing from the works of Nancy Cartwright, Jacques Lacan, and Catherine Malabou. In the eighth and final Session, we observe certain attempts in post-humanist and Platonist philosophy to traverse the piety of an anthropocentrism or humanism that reifies subjectivity as somehow in exception to nature, the better to reconceive of a subjectivity that uproots itself from the natural order as it intervenes upon the latter, transforming both in the process. We focus on Danielle MacBeth’s Realizing Reason and David Roden’s Posthuman Life, where the transformation of subjectivity in the wake of techno-cognitive transformation also involves a transformation in our conceptions of nature, and the relation between the two.

 

IMAGE: Piotr Nathan, Rituale des Verschwindens (detail), 2004, installtion view at Berghain, Berlin, Photo: Christine Fenzl

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