the knowledge of nature

St Mary's Church, Birkin (c. 1140)

[Image source: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3799134 . Photo © Alan Murray-Rust (cc-by-sa/2.0) ]

Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product of nature, in that sense of nature in which it is said to be an object of knowledge ? This is our first question.

I've been taking a look at Thomas Hill Green's Prolegomena to Ethics. Green (1836 - 1882) was a British Idealist in phlosophy (along with F.H. Bradley and others), and a vocal Liberal in politics. Green, who was born in the village of Birkin in the West Riding, was appointed Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1877. That appointment allowed him to set about his major work, but it was left unfinished when he died from blood poisoning in March 1882, and was published posthumously (his fellow Balliol man A.C. Bradley acting as editor) in April 1883. (A large part had already appeared in Mind.)

Here's the quote in its context. Green is querying the contention that the moral aspects, and even the epistemological aspects, of our conscious life can be considered part of a materialistic Nature (as per Hume, Mill, evolutionary theorists...).

§8. The elimination of ethics, then, as a system of precepts, involves no intrinsic difficulties other than those involved in the admission of a natural science that can account for the moralisation of man. The discovery, however, that our assertions of moral obligation are merely the expression of an ineffectual wish to be better off than we are, or are due to the survival of habits originally enforced by physical fear, but of which the origin is forgotten, is of a kind to give us pause. It logically carries with it the conclusion, however the conclusion may be disguised, that, in inciting ourselves or others to do anything because it ought to be done, we are at best making use of a serviceable illusion. And when this consequence is found to follow logically from the conception of man as in his moral attributes a subject of natural science, it may lead to a reconsideration of a doctrine which would otherwise have been taken for granted as the most important outcome of modern enlightenment. As the first charm of accounting for what has previously seemed the mystery of our moral nature passes away, and the spirit of criticism returns, we cannot but enquire whether a being that was merely a result of natural forces could form a theory of those forces as explaining himself. We have to return once more to that analysis of the conditions of knowledge, which forms the basis of all Critical Philosophy whether called by the name of Kant or no, and to ask whether the experience of connected matters of fact, which in its methodical expression we call science, does not presuppose a principle which is not itself any one or number of such matters of fact, or their result.

Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product of nature, in that sense of nature in which it is said to be an object of knowledge ? This is our first question. If it is answered in the negative, we shall at least have satisfied ourselves that man, in respect of the function called knowledge, is not merely a child of nature. We shall have ascertained the presence in him of a principle not natural, and a specific function of this principle in rendering knowledge possible.

On that last point, Green elaborates the metaphor a little later:
"there is a sense in which man is related to nature as its author,
as well as one in which he is related to it as its child" (§10).

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Green uses the example, a rather dramatic one, of an engine driver who misreads a signal. The engine driver, wondering if has made a mistake, has a conception of the "real", as opposed to the mistaken and illusory world of the unreal. From where do we get that conception?

a consciousness of events as a related series — experience in the most elementary form in which it can be the beginning of knowledge — has not any element of identity with, and therefore cannot properly be said to be developed out of, a mere series of related events, of successive modifications of body or soul, such as is experience in the former of the senses spoken of. No one and no number of a series of related events can be the consciousness of the series as related. Nor can any product of the series be so either. ... (§16)

§17. ' Perhaps not,' it may be replied, ' but may it not be a product of previous events ? ' If it is so, a series of events of which there is no conscious experience must be supposed to produce a consciousness of another series. On any other supposition the difficulty is only postponed. For if the series of events which produces a certain consciousness of other events is one of which there is a consciousness, this consciousness, not being explicable as the product of the events of which it is the consciousness, will have in turn to be referred to a prior series of events ; and ultimately there will be no alternative between the admission of a consciousness which is not a product of events at all  and the supposition stated — the supposition that the primary consciousness of events results from a series of events of which there is no consciousness. But this supposition, when we think of it, turns out to be a concatenation of words to which no possible connexion of ideas corresponds. It asserts a relation of cause and effect, in which the supposed cause lacks all the characteristics of a cause. It may be questioned whether we can admit anything as a cause which does not explain its supposed effect, or is not equivalent to the conditions into which the effect may be analysed. But granting that we may, a cause must at least be that to which experience testifies as the uniform antecedent of the effect. Now a series of events of which there is no consciousness is certainly not a set of conditions into which consciousness can be analysed. And as little can it be an antecedent uniformly associated with consciousness in experience, for events of which there is no consciousness cannot be within experience at all.

...Nature, with all that belongs to it, is a process of change : change on a uniform method, no doubt, but change still. All the relations under which we know it are relations in the way of change or by which change is determined. But neither can any process of change yield a consciousness of itself, which, in order to be a consciousness of the change, must be equally present to all stages of the change ; nor can any consciousness of change, since the whole of it must be present at once, be itself a process of change. There may be a change into a state of consciousness of change, and a change out of it, on the part of this man or that ; but within the consciousness itself there can be no change, because no relation of before and after, of here and there, between its constituent members — between the presentation, for instance, of point A and that of point B in the process which forms the object of the consciousness. (from §18)

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I'm not a philosopher, but I understand that Green is working towards an "infinite regress" kind of reductio ad absurdum in which A, on the materialist view, depends on B depends on A depends on B depends on A.... It's a classic example of using the word "itself" to attempt to clinch an illuminating point.

But this is like the chicken and the egg. We know that neither chicken nor egg came "first", they evolved together as a combined group, very slowly, from different creatures with different eggs.  Why could not the nature we experience, and our understanding of that nature (so far as we can in fact understand it) come slowly into existence alongside each other as a combined group, and from the same common source, namely an older and less developed and less self-conscious nature?

This is not a denial of what Green is anxious to defend, namely morality, religion and democracy. It's more a matter of seeing these principles as immanent in the wonderful complexity and mystery of nature, rather than as transcendent principles injected from a world above.

From this perspective it's obvious that I resist the rhetorical implications in the merely of  "merely a result of natural forces", by which Green smuggles in a prior discrediting of what has yet to be examined.