The Problem of Natural Philosophy

In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson laid out a grand vision for how the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities might be coherently interrelated. Given how chaotic and fragmented our current knowledge systems are, it is easy to understand why Wilson longed for such a vision. Wilson was also explicit that we had not yet achieved consilience, and he was quite specific on where the problem was located.

Before we get into that, let’s be clear about what Wilson meant by "consilience." He defined it as the “jumping together of knowledge by linking facts and fact-based theory across the disciplines to create a common ground of explanation” (p. 8). Wilson argued that the physical, chemical, and biological sciences had largely achieved consilience. In his view, the problem was when we got to humans—that is when our basic consilient understanding breaks down.

Defining Natural Philosophy

Those who are familiar with the history of Western thought will know that the natural sciences used to be called “natural philosophy.” This fact shows itself when we consider that Isaac Newton’s classic, monumental work laying out his mathematical analysis of time, force, and motion that has guided the development of modern physical science was titled The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

What, exactly, was natural philosophy? To understand it, we must remember that, at the time of his writing in the mid-17th Century, virtually everyone in Europe, including Newton, was a devout Christian. Thus, almost everyone divided the world into the natural world that God had set in motion via the “laws of nature” and the supernatural world of angels and God, with humans being a mix of both the natural and supernatural worlds. The result was in the Great Chain of Being in Christian thought. And so, natural philosophy, which becomes natural science, is essentially the systematic study of the natural world minus humans (and, in the Christian worldview, the supernatural plane of existence).

I think we should bring back the concept of natural philosophy and align it with Wilson's dream of consilience. Framed as such, we can think about natural philosophy being the study of the natural world placed in relationship to human history. This is aligned with how the philosopher Nicholas Maxwell frames natural philosophy. In advocating for a similar return to natural philosophy, he characterized it as being concerned with framing the relationship between the human world and the physical universe as follows:

[The central question is] how can our human world, the world as it appears to us, the world we live in and see, touch, hear and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value—how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical Universe?

The Consilience Conference will explore how the Unified Theory of Knowledge can address the problem of natural philosophy.

Gregg Henriques

The Problem of Natural Philosophy: Where Consilience Breaks Down

This analysis brings us back to Wilson and where he saw consilience breaking down. Specifically, it was where the natural sciences met human history. He laid this out in his book and explicitly framed the problem as follows (p. 126):

We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. What, in the final analysis, joins the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of far-flung societies? That, in my opinion, is the nub of the relationship between the two cultures. It can be stated as a problem to be solved, the central problem of the social sciences and the humanities, and simultaneously one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences.

At present time no one has a solution. But in the sense that no one in 1842 knew the true cause of evolution and in 1952 no one knew the nature of the genetic code, the way to solve the problem may lie within our grasp.

Wilson is saying we do not know how to place the picture of the world given to us by natural science in proper relationship to human history. I think a good name for the problem Wilson is highlighting is the problem of natural philosophy. We can state it as follows: "How do human history and the social construction of knowledge align with how the natural sciences map patterns in nature?"

It is properly considered a problem of philosophy rather than science because it is about how our systems of knowledge (e.g., natural science and history) relate. And, as Maxwell notes, it concerns things like values and the qualitative experience of being in the world. In other words, natural philosophy is not just about empirically investigating how things behave in the world (which remains natural science), it is also concerned with the big-picture view of how humans know things and how they construct knowledge.

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In my previous writings on Psychology Today, I have emphasized the great knowledge problem of our time, the Enlightenment Gap. The Enlightenment Gap refers to the fact that, as natural science emerged, a fundamental problem emerged in our philosophical understanding of the world and our place in it. Namely, we were unable to effectively place the mind in relationship to matter, nor were we able to place scientific knowledge in relationship to subjective and social knowledge. With this backdrop, we can see that the two ideas are related, such that we can say that the problem of natural philosophy gives rise to the Enlightenment Gap.