Murray Bookchin’s ideas on dialectical naturalism have sparked significant debate among ecophilosophers, even within social ecology—particularly his view that it is possible to extract an objective ethics from natural history. Chaia Heller and Peter Staudenmaier are two ISE instructors who have been on opposite sides of this debate in past years, which they are here revisiting in conversation.
Chaia Heller: Dialectical naturalism is the name of an approach to the dialectical tradition developed by Murray Bookchin. He was raised a Marxist in the dialectical revolutionary tradition associated with Marx’s dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism traces the historical dynamic, if you will, between society and materiality. It looks at what societies produce and how they distribute what’s produced across history–as well as examining the social changing relations that surround production over the centuries.
Bookchin wanted to “ecologize” dialectical materialism to provide a natural history for the idea of freedom, and also for the idea of truth. And so for Bookchin, dialectical naturalism is a reading of natural history that yields an understanding of potentialities that emerge over time throughout natural history as evolution moves from the first organic cellular forms of life through the gradual emergence of a second nature, a human nature, and then on, potentially, to a third or free nature. For Bookchin, it was very important to understand the epistemological features of dialectical naturalism. He was very interested in how we think about nature and society moving through history in such a way that as history moves, there are trends in what he calls first nature that become increasingly conscious, increasingly, if you will, intentional, increasingly formalized or institutionalized as we create culture that is a ‘second nature’.
Bookchin was interested in this idea of increasing levels of consciousness, freedom, subjectivity, cooperation etc. And as we move through history, these tendencies that emerge within this first ‘moment’ of first nature become increasingly conscious and thus increasingly free. And this is again, a way of thinking about nature; Nature and society are no longer two distinct categories.
They are now one historical continuous process marked by first nature, which is all of history before the emergence of humanity and then a second nature which gradually comes into being with the emergence of humanity. The epistemological dimension of Bookchin’s dialectical naturalism allows us to understand how first nature gradually emerges to create a second nature or society.
The ethical features of dialectical naturalism emerge as Bookchin asserts that these dialectical trends (evolutionary or historical) emerge over time and tend towards increasing levels of freedom, subjectivity, and consciousness. I focus on these three features more than on the idea of ‘complexity,’ –we can talk about that question later. We can look at these trends, these potentialities, that emerge over time and grow increasingly conscious as we move through natural history. And we can use these trends to form the ground for a social ethics. Bookchin isn’t saying, however, that these trends are ‘ethical’ per se. He’s not saying that there is anything inherently ethical about biology or about natural history. Because of who we are as humanity, because we make sense of the world around us in ethical terms, we can derive ethical meaning from our reading of natural history. We can, then, do a reading of this movement towards ever increasing levels of subjectivity, consciousness, and freedom. And from this reading, we can educe principles such as freedom, inter-subjectivity, solidarity, and mutualism–recognizing their history–so that these principles are not coming from ‘nowhere,’ but are coming from a reading of our own natural history. Bookchin asserts that humanity can look at the natural history of a second nature that in turn gives rise to human beings. Humanity can derive an ethical set of meanings from that historical story or trajectory.
When people look at dialectical naturalism they ask rightfully if Bookchin is committing the naturalistic fallacy by asserting that there is something that ought to be in the world or in nature. Is he deriving the ‘ought’ from the ‘is?’ Is Bookchin’s way of thinking about natural history just a circular, faulty, and fallacious way of reasoning? Or, as I argue, does Bookchin redefine both ‘nature’ and ‘objectivity’ sufficiently to evade the naturalistic fallacy?
Bookchin isn’t simply saying what ought to be such as increasing levels of freedom, consciousness, and self-determination–he’s not just saying these trends are ‘good’ because he personally thinks they are good. He’s identifying a trend that is objective and stable enough to be read, grasped, and theorized. As we engage in a reading of the emergence of first nature into a second nature, we can attribute to that trend something ethical or a ground for a naturalistic ethics.
Bookchin redefined nature as natural history rather than as a static framed view of the world as we see in modernist, positivist, and reductionist understandings of what ‘counts’ for nature. The question now becomes, does Bookchin’s redefinition sufficiently elude the modernist reductionist understanding of nature so that it evades the naturalistic fallacy? I argue that it does. Yet I also think that dialectical naturalism needs to be further developed; I’ve been thinking about this for years and am currently writing about it. I think Bookchin opened the door to others seeking to refinine and hopefully nuance and complexify our understanding of dialectical naturalism.
Peter Staudenmaier: Well that was a terrific summary. There’s three and a half decades worth of debates around these topics. I’m sure these debates were going on before I bumped into the ISE, but several of us on this call right now have been involved in 30 plus years worth, which is a really good sign of how much the Institute for Social Ecology encourages and respects healthy disagreement and debate.
Anyway, a lot of those debates have themselves evolved over time. I no longer hold a number of the positions that I held in 1991. Chaia’s ideas have evolved over time and I’m really excited to see the work that you’re doing right now. And I think something that Chaia said a moment ago is important, the extent to which Bookchin set a groundwork that would allow and encourage other social ecologists to build further and refine. I think that’s exactly right. So that’s the job that is up to current and future generations of social ecologists.
But for what it’s worth, a lot of other social ecologists, myself included, have indeed been critical of various aspects of dialectical naturalism over the years for dozens of different reasons. Some of us argued with Bookchin about this when he was still around, some of us have been arguing with each other about it over these many years. But even those of us who are sometimes intensely critical of some aspects of dialectical naturalism, and I want to note this explicitly, recognize the extraordinary philosophical achievement that went into that part of Bookchin’s work. It’s a genuinely remarkable aspect of social ecology. There are not a lot of other alternatives out there within the dialectical tradition that take ecological aspects seriously and don’t completely fumble that topic. If you look back at the work of Engels in the nineteenth century, with all due respect to Friedrich Engels, some of those earlier attempts at a dialectical philosophy of nature are utterly unconvincing if you ask me.
If you look at a few of the other twentieth century and late twentieth century alternatives, Bookchin’s work is vastly more sophisticated in my view, and I’m one of its critics. So I think we really do need to recognize the extent to which he was trying to recombine various aspects of ancient Greek philosophy, early German Idealism, late twentieth century systems theory, ecological thinking – it is a genuinely remarkable philosophical synthesis, even for those of us who are not convinced by various parts of it. So I do want to note that.
Some of the questions that have come up in these debates have to do with elements that have already been mentioned, but different critics have focused on different aspects. There’s not one debate around dialectical naturalism. I would say there’s more like 3 or 4 overlapping debates. The ones that I would tend to bring our attention to have to do with first, the whole question of an objective grounding for an emancipatory ethics. That is something that I see in part coming out of the historical circumstances that Bookchin himself was working in. He had excellent reasons for looking for an objective grounding for ethics. The historical context that he was trying to push back against was a pretty bleak historical context. So I do not say that he was wrong to look for an objective grounding for ethics. The question is more, at a philosophical level, is that a convincing move? Do we think we need an objective grounding for an ethical framework? And if we do think we need that, does the particular philosophy of nature that dialectical naturalism presents to us look like it fits the bill? And several social ecologists say no to one or both of those questions. So that’s the first point that I’ll raise, does the notion of dialectical naturalism offer us an objective grounding for an emancipatory ethics?
The second one and maybe the most vigorously debated at the Institute for Social Ecology over the years has been, what do we make of Bookchin’s specific account of natural evolution? And that’s the kind of thing where you would expect to find debate because evolutionary biologists are changing their minds all the time on that score. Murray was drawing on the available science of his time. So his own views shifted and changed over the years. And he passed away in 2006, so we can’t expect his views to have changed since then. But even back when he was alive, he and I and others argued a lot about those issues.
So there are reasonable grounds for asking: did he offer a persuasive account of natural evolution all by itself, regardless of what we make about its ethical implications, regardless of what we make about its political implications? We could have interesting debates about the theory of natural evolution that he presented.
Third, Bookchin argued at several points that values are implicit in the natural world. If that’s true, what does it actually mean in practice? What does it mean when we are in a particular social situation and we are going over a specific set of ethical dilemmas that we need to solve? How do we actually draw on the values that we are told are implicit in the natural world? Does that do anything for us? Does it help move forward a particular emancipatory political program? Does it help solve a particular set of questions about the relations between a society and its natural environment? If it doesn’t help us do that, it raises a whole series of interesting philosophical questions that eventually social ecologists should have to answer.
And last but not least is a really, really big question. How much does all of this matter to the project of dialectical naturalism as a whole? When I would sometimes confront Bookchin about this back when he was still with us, the stronger version of his answer was “You will doom the project of dialectical naturalism if you don’t recognize how central these questions are to dialectical naturalism, and how central this version of dialectical naturalism is to social ecology as a whole.”
I disagreed then on that question and I disagree now. I think there’s a lot more room for very different versions of a lot of those questions. I think we could come up with an alternative account of an objective grounding for ethics and an alternative account of how natural evolution actually works, an alternative account of the relationships between values that are implicit in the natural world and how those things play out in any specific social context. All of those things allow for, in my view, a much wider range of positions that are still compatible with the larger framework that Bookchin established for dialectical naturalism, but where the particulars will end up pointing in very different directions.
Blair Taylor: So I guess a question that comes for me then is what is dialectical naturalism without that grounding of objective ethics? Because that seems pretty central, and I’m not sure what else would be left..
Peter Staudenmaier: Sure, that would be a question incumbent on critics like me to offer a more developed answer to, certainly more developed than I have offered so far.
Chaia Heller: I think it’s important to establish why an objective ethics is so central to Bookchin for this entire project and why it was essential to ground that in a reading of natural evolution. So two different questions that I want to address. When I first met Murray, we were reading The Eclipse of Reason by Max Horkheimer (who was part of the Frankfurt School), and the context was freakishly similar to now, to this moment. I didn’t know that I’d live long enough to witness a moment that was in some ways echoing a lot of the things that he was concerned about. And what he was concerned about was the problem with authoritarianism, fascism, and the horrific displays of the abuse of power, watching the Holocaust unfold, etc…
He and others in the Frankfurt School were trying to figure out how, in a society in Western Europe that saw itself as a pinnacle of ‘civilization’ and ‘reason’, how could people become utterly irrational, hysterical, and feel ‘love’ for a fascist dictator? How could their reason be so eclipsed that they just gunned down, decimated, and burned up two thirds of Jews in Europe along with Roma people and other political prisoners? How could such an eclipse of reason happen?
And what he felt was the reason it could happen was that there was no ground for an objective kind of reason that could say this is objectively right, and this is objectively wrong. There was no theoretical ground on which to establish that fascism is unethical, it’s irrational, it’s wrong, and that a non-authoritarian society and non-hierarchical, and directly democratic society would be more right, ethical, and rational. He would say this over and over: That it can’t just be that “whatever is good for you is good for you, and whatever is good for me is good for me.”
There had to be something that transcended me as an individual, or you, as an individual, that we were both answerable to. And that ground, he felt, was “nature as natural history.” He felt that there had to be something more stable, with greater longevity, something more historical, broader and more vast than just two humans talking to each other, or humanity even in itself. He felt that natural history brought human beings into being and this history provided what I would call a “ground that moves.” It’s a ground that’s inherently unstable, a ground that is always developing, a ground that is becoming. It’s a ground that’s bigger than us.
And so the question is, he felt we had to have some sort of objective ground for making distinctions between truth claims as being real or not real, rational or not rational, authoritarian or not authoritarian. He believed that there had to be some way to anchor our claim so it’s not just personal opinion, because when you go down that road you’re just in the realm of existentialism where (as Nietsche said) ‘God is dead’ and human beings must make meaning out of the world however they see it. He felt that that kind of thinking is actually inherent to the logos (or anti-logos) if you could use that word, of fascism.
In the irrationality of fascism, whatever you feel–from a Wagner symphony to the emotion people felt in Nuremberg rallies where they’re hysterically crying “Hail Hitler,–that kind of emotion and intuition is tied to the irrationality of fascism. Bookchin felt this emotion was central to the fascist impulse. The abandonment of reason and the retreat into this shadowy subjective domain where each person is locked in their own emotional personhood–this makes truth and makes claims about what counts for good and bad improbable if not impossible. So, if Hitler says, “all the Jews are destroying the genetic stock of humanity and their moral integrity,” if Hitler felt that and everybody is feeling all of this with him, then these feelings held a truth that was objective.
So for Bookchin, being able to create a free society that is not going to go off the rails into authoritarianism, fascism, domination, and hierarchy – we need to anchor our vision of a society in something greater than us. And his answer was that the thing that’s greater than us is the history that brought human beings and society into being.
This is why he believed objectivity was very important. Because if you don’t have it (some form of objective ethics), you’re stuck in the realm of subjectivity, which is the realm of ethical relativism. Again, what’s good for you is good for you and what’s good for me is good for me. He used to call this predicament, “the bad marketplace of personal opinions.”
The second question is why anchor (objectivity) in nature, and does Bookchin redefine nature sufficiently so that it doesn’t just become another version of the naturalistic fallacy? He’s saying I’m not taking nature to be the modernist framing of nature as a still photograph, a landscape frozen in time, but rather looking at nature as a process of natural history-making that’s marked by increasing levels of self-determination, freedom, consciousness and subjectivity that moves from organisms who have the most nascent form of subjectivity, meaning that they’re just able through their own metabolism to maintain their the boundaries of their identity over time so that an organism literally can continue to exist because its metabolism allows it to persist from one second to another. The organism, then, is not entirely identical to itself from one moment to the next, but is identical enough that it maintains its identity. So identity, metabolic identity, is the first form of nascent subjectivity for Bookchin. And as we move through natural history, he watches how first nascent forms of subjectivity become increasingly differentiated and developed to the point of creating consciousness and then eventually, self consciousness.
I believe that there are 3 correctives that Bookchin brings to concepts of nature and objectivity that I believe open the way to create a more richly articulated understanding of dialectical naturalism.
I have started using the term “dialobjectivity” instead of objectivity. I’ve been working for I don’t know, maybe almost 4 decades, to figure out a term that could point to this new dialectical approach to objectivity. And the first corrective is to try to move away from seeing objectivity as anything more than an ideal just as utopia is an ideal: As we move towards it, the utopian horizon recedes further into the distance so that we never quite reach it. Freedom is also an ideal– we know that we will never reach the wholly free society.
It’s not, you know, a Marxian telos where we reach stateless socialism and the end of history has arrived. No. Freedom in itself is also an ideal that recedes into the distance as we move towards it. Direct democracy is yet another ideal in that we’ll never create a free and perfect society because Bookchin saw history as a movement toward increasing levels of wholeness that never achieves complete wholeness. And that’s why when I teach dialectical naturalism, I always draw diagrams of a spiral. Because Bookchin did not believe that wholeness in itself was achievable. Once you ‘think in a circle’, seeing development as circular, you have stasis and a closed system. The way to keep the idea of development open ended is to convey ever-increasing levels of wholeness that are never complete, never end.
So I would take that same approach to a concept of objectivity and say we can have increasing levels of objectivity, but we’ll never reach complete objectivity. That’s why I call it dialobjectivity – to remind that it’s an ideal, that the pursuit of objectivity is a practice, an active process. Objectivity is not a noun, it’s a verb. It’s an active process in which we dialectically move between our subject positions, because we’re always located – each of us who articulates a truth claim, is located geopolitically, where we live. We are each marked by indices of ethnicity, class, racialization, sex, gender, and age. So we’re always limited and situated in our subject positions. But this doesn’t mean we are only our subject positions. It means that we can move towards an objective understanding of reality that is always understood as being in dialogue with our subject positions, or our subjectivity.
So dialobjectivity is the pursuit of an ideal of objectivity that is always receding as we move towards it –and I think that’s one thing that Bookchin missed the mark on. But when he used the term objectivity, I don’t think he imagined or envisioned the kind of objectivity people often assume he did. He didn’t imply objectivity as a steady state, a closed system, or as relating to an object that has a static or closed “end” at all. I think the term dialobjectivity takes away some of the weight of the term ‘objectivity’ and emphasizes that it’s an ideal, again, just as utopia, freedom, direct democracy, and justice are ideals that, while necessary, always exist in a state of becoming that is incomplete.
The first of the three correctives of social ecology’s dialobjectivity is the subjective corrective. Let’s first look at nature. The subjective corrective takes the concept of nature and recognizes the subjectivity within first nature. Even a eukaryotic cell cannot be reduced to an algorithm or a machine; there is within that organism an indeterminacy that makes it nascently free. Just by its metabolism, just by its ability to maintain its own identity over time, we can see a subjective aliveness there. We now have taken the idea of a static, passive, or mechanistic nature and rendered it subjective, alive. And in so doing, we’ve shifted away from a modernist, positivist, reductionist, mechanistic view of nature. We’ve replaced it with a view of nature as increasingly free, active, conscious, and self-directed.
The second corrective of social ecology’s dialobjectivity is the intersubjective corrective. Here, we see nature as marked by a nascent mutualism, a relationship between a self and other. We see an intersubjective dimension to nature as natural history. We see this in the work of Peter Kropotkin, who looks at interspecies (and intras-species) cooperation and he even emphasizes this evolutionary tendency. Darwin did too, although his work is often misread (by science pundits like Herbert Spencer). Today, many evolutionary biologists see solidarity, mutualism, or interdependence as a much more defining trend than competition as we move through natural history. The intersubjective corrective, then, recognizes natural history as being marked by intersubjectivity, or by the term Kropotkin uses, “mutual aid.”
The third corrective of dialectical naturalism is the developmental corrective. Now we’re not seeing nature as a static thing or noun, but as a verb. Nature is something that is always in the process of becoming. First nature is always engaged in the process of becoming increasingly free, subjective, self-directed, and mutualistic.
The idea of nature as “developmental” speaks to the notion that nature itself is never complete. Becoming, then, is an endless state of ever-increasing levels of wholeness. If you are really taking a developmental view of natural history, you never reach a hard telos or an end. Instead we’re looking at an open-ended movement over time where we can achieve increasing levels of wholeness.
The developmental corrective is also important because it allows us to take the dialectic in a positive direction where we can see natural history as a series of open-ended ‘moments’ rather than a series of hard stages.
Rather than see new phases as negating the past via a hard rupture, we are seeing how degrees of potentiality from all previous moments in a development are both incorporated and transcended. So the “developmental correction” allows us to see natural history as incorporating both the potentiality and limits of all previous moments. We can also see how each previous moment is transcended by a later moment. So we’re bringing together ideas of both transcendence and incorporation so that we see development as cumulative (adding novel or new moments) and not simply negative (negating previous moments).
Previous dialectical theories of history offer a more negative dialectic. Hegel proposed a dialectic that relied much more on negation, as did Marx. Bookchin’s developmental approach takes a much more organic approach to understanding a biological process that is not based on negative dialectic but, again, allows for what could be called a cumulative dialectic.
So those are three correctives to the idea of nature that I believe help us evade a naturalistic fallacy. Dialobjectivity is the overall corrective. It redefines the dialectical project. I think that people are misled and confused by the term ‘objectivity.’ Bookchin means something very different from almost everyone else when he invokes the term. So I think dialobjectivity is a really important linguistic intervention. Again, the three correctives are subjective, intersubjective and developmental.
Peter Staudenmaier: I think that’s great. One of the really fascinating things here is that It’s been years since Chaia and I have had a chance to sit down and and hash out any of this stuff and it’s just remarkable the extent to which your and my thinking about this in some ways tends to diverge, and then in some ways tends to converge again. So I just love listening to some of the stuff you said. A lot of it I could 98% fully agree with, and others bring up all these other questions that I want to spend hours arguing and debating. But once again, it shows the extent to which Bookchin was able to put forward a philosophically fruitful program that continues to spark really interesting, thoughtful debates all these years later.
I’d like to go back to what Chaia mentioned a while ago, Murray’s concern about relativism and objectivism, which she gave an excellent summary of. What I tend to think these days is somewhat similar to some of the objections I raised back in the nineties, which have to do with what Murray called relativism. Chaia is right that then, as now, we are facing a historical period where lots of people doubt the very existence of objective truths about reality. Insisting that there are in fact hard objective truths, I think that is crucial for any radical project. That part I 100% endorse.
Part of the differences involve how that affects moral reasoning. How does that impact the ways in which human beings engage in ethical discourse? And that’s something where Murray and I disagreed pretty strongly and where I still disagree with parts of that framework.
What Murray called relativism, I see instead as part of the freedom that ethical deliberation gives to us. I think we want to include a pretty hefty element of open-endedness to our ethical deliberations, where people are able to engage in speculation about what the good entails and what it doesn’t entail, where people are able to engage in thoughtful back and forth critical rejoinders to each other’s ethical claims, and where those claims are not in fact grounded in any set of assertions about what must be the case regarding the natural world or any other aspect of objective reality. Our ethical claims do need to fit into how the world actually operates. We can’t make ethical claims that are based on the notion that if we just all put our minds together, we will magically solve the climate crisis through goodwill, etc. We do need to make ethical claims that are in fact in touch with reality as it exists.
But I also like the notion that ethical reasoning offers us a freedom that transcends those boundaries. I think that’s actually a really important part of the moral dimension of our critical faculties. That dimension is decisively different from the kind of reasoning that we engage in when we’re trying to figure out what is in fact objectively true about the natural world, about the structure of the universe, about the way the planet works, etc. So maybe there still is some sort of significant epistemological divide going on there. Or maybe there isn’t and we just haven’t figured out the terms that we need to use to describe that.
Another thing that Chaia said just a few minutes ago that I loved concerns an important divide within the dialectical tradition as a whole. Forget about dialectical naturalism for a minute, within the much broader current of dialectical philosophy that goes back hundreds of years now we can identify a distinction between a form of negative dialectics and the version that Bookchin started to develop later in his life. This is actually a pretty significant distinction, and I have to include myself as one of those social ecologists who are drawn more toward the negative dialectical tradition. And the way that really became clear to me, unfortunately, after Murray had already passed, was when I went back and looked at some of the shifting ways he referred to Adorno’s work. If you look at some of the ways that Bookchin referred to Adorno in his 1970s and 1980s writings and compare it to how he referred to Adorno in his writings from the 1990s and early 2000s there are initially some very positive references to Adorno that become increasingly critical and eventually wholly dismissive.
That’s not shocking if you think about the change in status that Adorno underwent. He went from being this marginal thinker that no one except a few people had ever heard of on the left in the English speaking world, like Murray Bookchin, to becoming an iconic, celebrated figure. I think that rubbed Murray the wrong way. I used to think that this was just Murray’s curmudgeonly side saying, “Adorno looks a little bit too much like a postmodernist to me” and deciding to write him out of his own intellectual genealogy. I now in retrospect think I was wrong. I think Murray had actually picked up on something, namely that Adorno was strongly identified with the negative dialectical tradition; his last book is called Negative Dialectics. And I think Murray realized that Adorno’s version of dialectics didn’t fit all that well with the more positive project that Chaia so wonderfully summarized a moment ago, the more positive dialectical project that Bookchin was trying to unfold and offer an alternative example of. And maybe part of the problem here is that I am not fully convinced that this positive project is going to be all that successful if it doesn’t pay better heed to the parts of the negative dialectical tradition that I think are still very powerful and important and need to get more attention than they currently receive in our 21st century environment.
The last point that is worth picking up on has to do with the questions we have both already raised, such as: How do we make sense of things like the self-sustaining nature of living organisms? How do we make sense of that drive that seems to be there in the natural world and in every form of life that we’re familiar with? How do we understand how that fits into a developmental timeline from the first appearance of life forms on this planet? If we think about what it is about living organisms that has that self-sustaining dynamic, one of the several arguments that comes up around dialectical naturalism is do we in fact see that particular set of long term tendencies over the course of the history of natural evolution? Or do we see a much more mixed record, one where you have long periods of natural evolution that are marked by not necessarily a whole lot of development, not necessarily much of anything at all resembling increasing subjectivity, consciousness, complexity, or diversity. Now, this is contested among evolutionary biologists, and it’s contested among philosophers. So my claim right now is not that Bookchin was wrong so much as that he was relying on a very particular version of evolutionary history that, so far, is eminently contestable and questionable to say the least. It was questionable then, and by my way of thinking, is possibly even more questionable now.
There are other versions of natural history and evolutionary history that offer equally compelling variants of the story that are built around contingency. Versions where sometimes you have increasing complexity and increasing diversity, but then you also have periods of decreasing complexity and decreasing diversity, etc, etc. Where the record is a lot more like Chaia’s spirals, but the arrows don’t really end up pointing in any particular direction at all. When I would try to present a not very informed and somewhat naive version of that counter argument to Murray in the 1990s, his responses were pretty dismissive. He did not seem to take some of those alternative accounts very seriously, but I think we need to. We need to take those alternative accounts of natural evolution very seriously and see what they might do to our understanding of the import of evolutionary dynamics for his account of first and second nature.
If critics like me are going to make these pretty serious claims about the philosophical structure of dialectical naturalism, then we the critics ought to come up with some sort of alternative set of proposals. That’s correct, and I sure haven’t done so yet and I recognize that. For the purpose of today’s discussion, I’m more trying to point to some of the potentially problematic areas that all of us should be thinking about.
Chaia Heller: Well said, Peter. I think today we are answerable to evolutionary biologists. The anthropology of science and technology instructs that anyone interested in science must listen to scientists. And starting in the 1990s onward it became very clear that the understanding of evolution that Murray was working with at the time had really shifted. Particularly regarding the notion of complexity, which is why I did not point to the notion of complexity (as a developmental principle or trend) but rather to ideas of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, freedom and consciousness. Because the evolutionary record reveals periods of incredible fecundity and complexity, but also periods of entropy and simplification. So I think that’s really important.
What I have found to be very useful is to shift from talking about or using the term evolution and looking more at the term development. Because organic or biological development is (and I don’t think a matter of personal opinion), there’s a “there” there that’s stable enough to assert that development is the gradation from a more generalized state to a more differentiated state. An example of this is if you look at a pig fetus and a human fetus, you can almost look at any mammalian fetuses, and they have very similar generalized features during the early stages of development. And as development unfolds in utero, the fetus starts to look increasingly pig-like if it’s a pig and human-like if it’s a human. Human newborns have a very generalized look; their heads are large in proportion to their shoulders, for instance. Newborns have (tragically) left hospitals with the wrong family which of course would never happen with a one-year-old child. One wouldn’t mistakenly take home someone else’s one or one-year-old. Hospitals always place a name band on the newborn’s ankle because they have this generalized appearance. But as human beings develop, we differentiate. And differentiation is that process of complexification where something that is general becomes more particularized.
Another example is when you meet somebody you knew in preschool in the supermarket as an adult. You might be able to recognize them, saying, hey I remember you because there’s some general set of features that they have retained. But now, they’re 30 something and they’ve differentiated so spectacularly that you recognize that they’re not the same person. You understand that they can’t be reduced to who they were at three. This is because there’s been a development from the general to the particular, from an undifferentiated state to an increasingly differentiated state.
I think the language of development (rather than evolution) is more useful to those considering dialectical naturalism. The notion of development helps us appreciate these two main moments in a dialectic, the general and the particular. When we consider social ecology’s epistemology and ethics, we can start to carve out sets of general principles that I arrange around a five-pointed star. These five principles include 1) non-hierarchy, 2) social justice, 3) direct democracy, 4) moral economy, and 5) ecology. Dialobjectivity asks that we understand these five principles as general ideals rather than a static point of arrival or an ‘end of history’. And as before, we’re constantly moving towards ever-increasing levels of non-hierarchy, social justice, direct democracy, moral economy, and an ecological sensibility and technology. Yet we never achieve a complete or ‘objective’ state of social justice, for example, as pure social justice always stands just beyond our grasp.
These general principles, or ideals, are then to be particularized by citizens in the public or political sphere. In the political sphere, we come together as citizens in a general assembly. It’s here that we put our own subjective and culture-bound thumbprint on those general principles.
We see this in the work of Abdullah Öcalan, who takes Bookchin’s general discussion of communalist politics and educes from that a more particularized version that he calls democratic confederalism. He draws out three principles of feminism, direct democracy, and ecology which become politicized in the popular assembly as citizens put their own Kurdish cultural stamp on those general principles.
In Rojava, Kurds have a very specific understanding of what (Westerners call) feminism. They don’t utilize the term general term feminism but instead use the Kurdish term ‘jineology.’ They draw from the anthropological record, considering elements of the Neolithic period in Mesopotamia. They bring their own cultural interpretation not just of ‘feminism’ but also of many sets of general principles. To me, this is what is exciting about social ecology or dialectical naturalism: It proposes a groundwork for a politics based on a general set of principles drawn from a reading of natural history that are meant to be particularized.
Peter, I don’t know if that addresses your search for a theoretical opening of sorts that allows us to avoid getting stuck in a rigid or static ‘objective’ notion of what is good or right. Perhaps when you argue for a less ‘objectivist’ approach, you’re wanting to lean in more towards the subjective or the cultural. It’s key that we have that ‘free space’ where people can autonomously and spontaneously particularize general principles in ways that are meaningful to them at a certain specific time, place, and culture in history.
Peter Staudenmaier: That was great, beautifully put. One possible alternative model might be we could think of natural evolution as having produced a group of organisms, human beings, which when they mature to a certain point are capable of engaging in the sort of ethical deliberation that opens up the possibility of free moral discourse not bound to an objective grounding, for those of us who are suspicious of that notion. The debt that we owe to natural evolution then is that it creates the very possibility for a free and open form of ethical deliberation.
But that’s a very particular view. Many ethicists don’t even share that view of what ethics is all about, what ethical deliberation is for, or what is involved in the process of moral reasoning. For those of us who are drawn to that approach, I could see a way of connecting that to a variant of dialectical naturalism. And that might also overcome what some critics of dialectical naturalism have faulted Bookchin for as a version of teleology. For what it’s worth, Bookchin explicitly rejected teleology several times. When some social ecologists would respond that he had snuck in versions of teleology by the back door – he would use the term nisus rather than telos – he would get angry. Not that it was hard to piss off Murray in the last 20 years or so of his life. But again, in retrospect, I now look back and realize he had reason to get mad when I was one of the people who would pose that critique to him, because he really was working hard to deteleologize. That’s not a word, but you understand what I mean. He was working really hard to exactly not offer, at least in his mind, a teleological version of dialectical naturalism. I failed to appreciate the extent to which he was trying really hard to do that at the time.
That said, I don’t know that he fully succeeded. I still think that there are some tendentially teleological elements that are still there within Bookchin’s version of dialectical naturalism that I think could be successfully overcome without making the entire thing collapse. But part of it depends on what we even mean by teleology in the first place. For example, if you think that includes attributing forms of directionality to natural evolution. I very much like Chaia’s notion of replacing the evolution talk with development. That makes a lot of sense, but that’s not how Bookchin presented it in his canonical works on the topic. What do you think Chaia, is that true? We’d have to go back to the texts I guess.
Chaia Heller: I think he saw natural histories being shaped by a developmental arc. I think he would not have wanted to die on the sword of evolution, but rather on the sword of development, becoming, and differentiation. But to return to teleology, I feel like it is like being pregnant–You either are or you’re not. There’s a developmental process there, but you’re either in it or not. I believe that Bookchin, by moving from directions that are predetermined to a directionality that’s open-ended and based on the confluence of so many different factors, that any development could stop at any time. If you look at the acorn and the oak tree, what percentage of the acorns that have the potential to become oak trees actually become oak trees? Point 1% of all acorns or less?
To me that’s a very evocative and moving consideration. He’s saying something so different from Marx, who appealed to a very hard telos. He believed it was not if but when stateless socialism would come, so he wanted to speed that up to reduce human misery and suffering. He wanted to mercifully speed up the process of the scientific flow of history. Bookchin said no, that the best we can do is create the sufficient conditions to have a revolution and create a good society, and even then it can all go to hell. And even then there’s no end of history, there’s no perfect utopia, and it might not happen at all. One thing he often said to me is that he was sad that he didn’t get to live to see socialism. Of course he meant small S stateless socialism. But, significantly, Bookchin didn’t say “you will live to socialism, Chaia.” Or “you won’t.” He believed that this was a potential (for us to reach socialism), but there was no end of history. There’s no telos. There was neither Aristotle’s “unmoved mover “ nor the inevitability of Marx’s stateless socialism.
I think people who say that there’s a telos in Bookchin’s work are misreading it because he’s very clear that the acorn is probably not going to become the oak tree, but it has the potential. I think development as a term is worth considering because it helps us to look at a logos, a structural logic. If you look at the genetic material in the acorn, it has this general form, a general structure, and if the right or sufficient conditions for the acorn to turn into an oak tree are present, that process of unfolding, differentiation, and moving from the general to particular (that is development ) will occur. I think that this way of talking about a developmental logos holds up and can possibly get us out of the bind where we’re married to the term natural evolution, which is an agglomeration of so many different elements. I think it lets us off the the evolutionary hook so to speak
Peter Staudenmaier: I like that, very really smartly put. Part of what I was reacting to back in the 1990s was the presence of a more subtle version of teleological thought, a more complex tradition certainly in the German intellectual heritage, even in parts of Marx’s work. They’re not parts that I endorse. I’m a lifelong anarchist, so it’s not that I’m celebrating these aspects of the teleological tradition. But I think they are out there. So I think part of what I was getting at back then when I would try to poke Murray with these things was that maybe there’s elements in Murray’s thought that are in a sort of subterranean dialogue with those more sophisticated and complex elements of the teleological tradition that aren’t just Aristotle’s version of telos, and that aren’t the simplistic version of Marx’s that we rightly reject.
But, in terms of today’s discussion. What’s the point? We don’t need to salvage those elements.
Maybe we should be looking at the the developmental logic that you’re pointing to Chaia, that seems promising and is compatible with the other other elements within dialectical naturalism and that are not bound to whatever aspects of Bookchin’s account of natural history that don’t seem to have held up so well to subsequent developments in the natural sciences. And if that’s the project, then even those of us who are critical of other parts of dialectical naturalism could be on board with that.
Chaia Heller: Just to sum up, I see a key shift from evolutionary biology to developmental biology, a shift towards the notion of development that was central to how Bookchin understood dialectical naturalism. I think ‘development’ is a great way to kind of hold his concept of an organic logos that is inhabited or embodied in every organic development.
Mason has recently done some very interesting inquiries around first nature and second nature, asking if there is a zeroth nature? Or perhaps a fourth nature? I used to ask Murray why his dialectic begins with organic life. Why not start with physics and the origins of the universe? He said of course one could start with pre-organic life, but the reason he started with organic life was because he was looking at society as an organic problem. His subject of inquiry is humans’ relationship with each other and society’s relationship with the rest of the natural world. He’d say that the organic is the realm he was trying to understand, contemplate, and make sense of. So that was his reasoning why he began with the first unicellular organism and metabolism rather than electrons, protons, and pre-organic life. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting or important; he was intrigued by complexity theory that was really becoming big in the 80s and 90s in physics, but he was far more interested in the fundamental features of organic life.
Again, the acorn has this structural logic that is its DNA; it has this logos, this organic code that is potentiated rather than deterministic. That acorn was not necessarily going to turn into an oak tree, but it was not going to turn into a bicycle either. It was not going to turn into a tomato, or into fairy dust. That is for sure. So Bookchin really wanted to create a developmental organic space between the random chaos we see in physics on the one hand, and the realm of (a modernist) predetermination on the other. I think Bookchin’s understanding of the developmental potential embedded in an organic structure like an acorn was a mediated place between the random chaos that would make an acorn into a bicycle, or a determinacy that would make it necessarily become an oak tree.