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Darwinian Liberal Education Larry a Rnhart

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Darwinian Liberal Education Larry a Rnhart THEORIES OF LIBERAL EDUCATION From time to time Academic Questions intends to present essays exploring the foun- dations of liberal education from a variety of differing philosophic perspectives. This is the first essay in the series. Darwinian Liberal Education Larry A rnhart e all know what's wrong with higher education today. Teaching and research W have become so specialized, fragmented, and incoherent that we cannot see that unity of knowledge necessary for sustaining general or liberal education. To renew the tradition of the liberal arts, we need a new unifying framework of thought. As far as I can tell, there is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary biology. I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergraduate student at the Uni- versity of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration in his Metaphysics that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire that leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehen- sive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole. But as a political scientist studying political philosophy, I found that almost no one in my academic world was open to such thinking. Aristotelian scholars had little interest in Aristotle's biology, and they were sure that Aristotle's moral and political philosophy had no connection to his biology. They were also sure that modern biology had no relevance to the study of political philosophy. On the other side of this gulf between political science and biology, I discovered that most biologists could not even comprehend the thought that biology might explain human morality and politics. Everyone assumed that biology belonged to the natural sciences, which had to be separated from the social sciences and the humanities. But if that is so, I wondered, then how can we pursue liberal education as a common activity embracing all fields of knowledge that have anything to say about the great questions of human existence in the cosmos? What has happened to Aristotle's vision of philosophy as the comprehensive search for the causes or reasons of all things? Larry Amhart is professor of political science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115; larnhart @niu.edu. Arnhart 7 In trying to answer this question, I was helped by reading Leo Strauss. In the In- troduction to Natural Right and History, he claimed that the most serious problem for the ancient Greek idea of natural right is that it seems to have been refuted by modern natural science. 1 Natural right in its classic form requires a teleological view of nature, because reason can discern what is by nature good for human beings only if they have a natural end. Strauss thought Aristotle had the clearest view of this dependence of natural right on natural teleology. Modern natural science, however, seems to deny natural teleology by explaining natural phenomena as determined by mechanical causes that act without ends or purposes. This creates a dilemma. If the science of man is to be part of a nonteleological science of nature, then human action must be explained by reduction to physical causes, which seems inadequate to explain human ends. The only alternative appears to be "a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man," but this rejects the comprehensive naturalism of the premodern exponents of natural right such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Neither reductionism nor dualism is fully satisfactory. Strauss concluded: "The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science. An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved." To my mind, this "fundamental dilemma" of modernity explained the loss of liberal education as a comprehensive study of the whole. The natural sciences assume a mate- rialist reductionism that cannot account for the human mind or spirit. The humanities assume a radical dualism that treats human conscious experience as autonomous in its separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. And the social sciences are torn between these two contradictory positions. We might overcome this dilemma, I thought, if we could see Darwinian biology as a comprehensive science that would unify all the intellectual disciplines by study- ing human experience as part of the natural whole. This would seem to continue the Aristotelian tradition of biology because, as Strauss observed, Aristotle believed that biology could provide "a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowl- edge of man. ''2 But I found that many of those influenced by Strauss assumed that Darwinian biology must deny the fundamental premises of Aristotelian natural right in denying the uniqueness of human beings as set apart from the rest of animal nature and in denying the cosmic teleology that sustains human purposefulness. Reading Leon Kass's Towards a More Natural Science helped me to see how I might answer these Straussian objections. Kass suggested that Darwinian biology could recognize human uniqueness as a product of emergent evolution, and it could recognize the internal teleology of living beings as goal-directed. Darwin failed to see how his own biology allowed "that certain differences of degree--produced naturally, accumulated gradually (even incrementally), and inherited in an unbroken line of descent--might lead to a difference in kind (or at least its equivalent), say, in mental capacity or inner life." So it seemed that Darwinian biology could support an emergent naturalism in which novel traits arise in evolutionary development at each higher level of organization in an "unbroken line of descent" leading to differences 8 Academic Questions / Fall 2006 in kind. Differences in degree passing over a critical threshold of evolution could produce differences in kind? On the question of teleology, I was impressed by Kass's distinction between "ex- ternal teleology" and "immanent teleology." External teleology is the conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator. By contrast to such cosmic teleology, Kass suggested that "the primary home of teleological thought is the internal and immanent purposive- ness of individual organisms, in their generation, their structure, their activities." This immanent teleology of living things was what Aristotle had in mind, Kass observed, when he spoke of natural teleology. And while Kass recognized that Darwinism was generally regarded as rejecting cosmic teleology, he noted that Darwinian biology implicitly assumed the immanent teleological nature of organisms. Even if evolution by natural selection is not purposeful, it produces organic beings that are purposeful. Plants and animals grow to maturity, and once grown, they act for ends set by the functional nature of the species. 4 I was inspired by Kass's striving for "a more natural science" that would require the kind of biological understanding of nature that could account for the ethical and intel- lectual purposefulness of human life as an expression of nature. Like Kass, I sought a biological science that recognizes "the tacit ethical dimension of animal life," and thus the "natural, animal bases for the content of an ethical life." Like Kass, I believed that a science of living nature would reject both reductionist monism, which reduces life to homogeneous matter, and transcendentalist dualism, which sees human mental and moral experience as simply separated from the rest of nature. 5 Like Kass, I decided that such a science could bring together Aristotle and Darwin. 6 In looking for such a science, I have been encouraged by the growing number of scholars who have begun to take seriously the idea of a unified liberal learning grounded in Darwinian science. In the 1970s, books by Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, and Edward O. Wilson suggested that a Darwinian account of human nature could provide a com- mon framework for all the intellectual disciplines studying human behavior within the order of nature as a whole, v Later, political scientists such as Roger Masters and James Q. Wilson showed how a Darwinian science of human nature could revive the Aristotelian tradition of naturalism in moral and political philosophy? Now, many scholars in biology, the social sciences, philosophy, literary theory, and the aesthetic arts are looking to Darwinian theory as a unifying conceptual framework.9 In 1998, Edward O. Wilson argued that the natural human desire to understand the world as an orderly whole was a quest for the fundamental unity of all knowledge, which he called "consilience"'~~ This longing for a comprehensive knowledge of the whole began with ancient philosophers such as Thales and Aristotle. It was renewed by the Enlighten- ment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But now, Wilson claimed, the progress in modem science has created the realistic prospect for satisfying this ancient longing by developing a web of causal explanations that would combine all of the intellectual disciplines. Crucial to this unification of knowledge would be evolutionary biology as explaining the nature of human beings and their place in the natural whole. Arnhart 9 Much of my research and teaching has been driven by this search for a compre- hensive natural knowledge rooted in Darwinian science. At the core of my thinking is the idea of human nature.
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