Biology and culture

Joseph Margolis

University of South Carolina

pp. 219-228

in: Phillip Honenberger (ed), Naturalism and philosophical anthropology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

I'm persuaded that, among the master categories of Western philosophy, the question of the relationship and difference between biology and culture must count as one of the most instructive and strategic for any systematic understanding of ourselves: especially, of our unique form of being; and yet, it's also one of the most neglected and laggardly developed notions among them. I'm also struck by the cannibalizing tendency of both categories to incorporate as much as each can — of the population of whatever belongs to the other's world — as in subsuming the whole of the mental and the cultural within the span of the biosphere or of bare physical nature; or, contrariwise, as in construing the whole of nature as a construction of cognizing mind. The paradoxes each such tendency engenders should, however, serve to warn us against hurrying to settle the boundaries of such judgments prematurely. Neither a literal-minded disjunction nor a conjunction of realism and Idealism will do: both idioms are heuristic conventions by which we articulate the relative advantages and limitations of our conceptual pictures of the relationship between worldly cognizers and cognized world, where such pictures (rather than "the world' itself) are constructed. Though we cannot address the world directly except through the constructed channel of "addressing the world directly', our "picture' of the encountered world as independent of our encounter is itself a construction, a posit, that cannot be confirmed (except in a benignly circular way). Nevertheless, I think we can count on some unforeseen gains as well.