Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract

Social Research, Winter, 2000 by Strachan Donnelley

Mayr is centrally and deeply interested in nature and seems interested in things human primarily as they relate to the growth of science and biological thought in particular, as well as our moral and communal responsibilities to humans and nature as informed by evolutionary biology and ecology. Unlike Berlin, he seems serenely untroubled by the problem of free will and spends little or no time seeking its philosophical resolution. (Mayr does sketch the historical emergence, natural and cultural, of a Berlinian free will and responsibility, but the sketch betrays no philosophical anguish and is pursued under skies free from the menacing clouds of determinism.) (Mayr, 1997:248 ff.). Why?

I think the answer lies in the fact that Berlin and Mayr conceptually entertain two different "natures": the classical physicalist nature of Newton and the modern biological nature of Darwin. Newton's nature has nothing to do with us, save instrumentally (practical resources), theoretically (scientific exploration), and perhaps spiritually (God's handiwork as disclosed by natural theology). Darwin's nature, on the other hand, has everything to do with us, since all life, including human life, is commonly descended and follows common (if plural) evolutionary and ecological processes, which are not deterministic in the Newtonian sense. Moreover, in the new Darwinian context, Vicoian science must in principle be reconsidered and expanded. If "like knows like" in virtue of what is held in common, then we must be able to comprehend and empathetically understand other forms of animate organic life, no matter the difficulties spawned by species differences. We are animate organisms ourselves. We have the epistemic arsenal to understand the quick from the dead and life's capacities, triumphs, and tragedies. Both philosophical logic and everyday experience attest to this fact of our human nature.

By emphatically recognizing ourselves as natural organisms, we in principle can know more than Vico and perhaps Berlin would explicitly claim. They were stopped in their tracks by Newton's science of nature, which knows no organic life, but is confined to "dead nature." (This in essence is Whitehead's and Jonas's critique.) We no longer need to be so stymied.

As noted, Mayr speaks of the natural evolution of open-ended genetic programs and the coevolution (natural and cultural) of brains, language, mind, and historical societies, all of which have allowed for the emergence of genuine circumscribed human freedom and responsibility in Berlin's sense. But being a natural scientist comfortable with "black boxes" unnecessary to his explanations, Mayr's reflections remain more or less philosophically relaxed and "externalist." They leave us without an "internalist" insider's rich understanding of how a morally inspired and responsible human animal comes about. Mayr carries us through kin and group selection for the requisite genetic propensity for altruistic, other-regarding moral capacities and character. He further claims that historical human cultural communities engender moral altruism (care for the other, the social community as a whole, the common good) (Mayr, 1991:154 ff.; 1997: 256). But can we not, at least in philosophical speculation, penetrate further? Can we not bring nature, freedom, and responsibility even more intimately and intelligibly together?