The Human Question

I'm thinking about a post I made earlier, where I said, "There is something important about the primacy of desire.  Important even for human ethics.  Desire is forward-looking.  Explaining motivation by pointing to past utility can leave out desire." A lot of evolutionary talk about the origin of ethics focuses on the useful: but it all starts with desire.  And ends there too.  Somewhere Nietzsche talked about the desire of things in nature to discharge themselves... Now Nietzsche's no metaphysician, but remembering what he said further reminds me of the neo-Platonic expression, "The good is self-diffusive." Another thought about another quote from that earlier post:   "It may be that evolutionary utilitarianism inasmuch as it treats the useful as prior to the intrinsically desirable, is likewise an unwitting anthropomorphism inasmuch as it treats nature as a whole   as if   it were a either person engaged in instrumental reasoning..." ...

Earlier I tried to sketch a proposal for treating nature as conceived via natural science is related to nature as given in experience as an aperture is related to the light that shines through it.  I'd like to try a different move here, but eventually relate the two to each other. I'm thinking now of the point that Kantians and post-Kantians make, i.e., that knowing facts about the natural world -- including facts about individual inclinations -- does not suffice to give one knowledge of obligation (in the sense of being absolute). I would like to point out that the sense of being obliged is had first of all by one looking at a concrete situation: i.e., "do this here and now!" rather than "one ought always do such and such!"  In this sense, it's like being called or vocation. Secondly, obligation (in the concrete situation) in the sense that I have in mind is identical with the command of conscience Thirdly, even though this voice is internalized...

This is a tentative proposal. Perhaps we can use a the metaphor of a lens letting in light to describe the relation between the aspects of nature that can be grasped via a mathematised description and the aspects that are apparent in our experience.  This analogy might be helpful, especially with evolution-related discussions, inasmuch as it underscores the disproportion between nature is often conceived  as a kind of mathematics in motion and nature as given in experience.  That is, the mathematical conception leaves something crucial out that is nevertheless apparent in our everyday, non-scientific engagements.  That something extra has to do with formal and final causality (even efficient causality, rightly understood, cannot be comprehended by a purely mathematical description, for the expemplary case of efficient causality is a human agent--all other efficient causes are understood as either exceeding or falling short of human agency).   We'll call that s...