An Ecological Organic Paradigm (EOP)

A modern version of the organic paradigm can be based on behavioral ecology, ecology being the study of the inter-relationships between an organism and its environment.1 To do this from the standpoint of behavior and cognition, the organic paradigm needs to coincide with our general levels of awareness or consciousness and be expressed in terms of our mental functional capacities. The modern ecological organic paradigm (EOP) being proposed thus will have the perspective of an ecology of cognition or an ecology of the mind or consciousness. It describes four general human mental functional capacities, in the context of evolutionary and psychological development, and loosely associates them to four general categories of experience with which we have to cope, adapt and interrelate.

The four functional cognitive capacities are described as appetite, social conscience, reason and an interpretive capacity. The dimensions of experience to which they each primarily, but not exclusively, interrelate are primal individual needs, society, the natural world in which we live and metaphysics.  “Interpretation” and “metaphysics” are being used here as broad categories that represent integration, orientation, and narrative, concerning meaning and purpose, and they represent our need for a coherent self and world in which we live. They have to do not so much with the natural world in which we live and of which we are a part, but with our individual and collective place in that world. This framework of analysis of four functional cognitive capacities and their inter- relationship to four general dimensions of experience will be referred to as the ecological organic paradigm.

The general framework of analysis that is being proposed is a modification of the work of Leslie Stevenson in Seven Theories of Human Nature (1987). In this work, Stevenson states that the best way to understand any philosophy or philosopher is to understand the assumptions being made concerning the nature of human beings, the nature of society, and the nature of the universe. Since the Copernican Revolution, however, assumptions about the nature of the universe have been increasingly divided into assumptions concerning the natural world in which we live and metaphysical assumptions about meaning and purpose that integrate our knowledge and create a narrative in space and time. One set of assumptions concerns the question how?  The other set of assumptions concerns the question why. The ecological organic framework for understanding the dynamics of moral and political philosophy being proposed thus has four very general categories rather than the three described by Stevenson. These consider the assumptions concerning the individual, society, nature, and metaphysics. Our capacities of cognition that primarily relate to each of these categories are sequentially described as appetite, social conscience, logical reasoning, and an interpretive capacity for integration and narrative.

This modern ecological organic paradigm is derived in part from classical philosophy. It is also compatible, however, with some recent concepts that include both natural and cultural evolution (co-evolution) and some recent concepts of psychological cognitive development. This perspective not only includes both nature and nurture, but also sees an interrelationship between them. There is freedom within form. Human nature is neither seen to be infinitely malleable by changing its social context, nor is it seen as only determined by evolution and genetics. James Q. Wilson, in The Moral Sense, wrote that, “two errors arise in attempting to understand the human condition. One is to assume that culture is everything, the other is to assume that it is nothing” (1993, p. 6). At the human level, evolution in the broadest sense entails cultural history, but our cultural history in the broadest sense also entails evolution. Human history, in this perspective, did not begin 5000 years ago with the written word.

This framework can accommodate both descriptive and normative concepts of human nature, and it can accommodate both the individual and social dimensions of human knowledge and activity. In this framework moral and political philosophy are perceived to be dynamic, not only because human nature is multidimensional, but also because the experiences to which we relate change and are changeable. The different dimensions of our cognition, whether they be “gut reactions” or rational reflections, enable us to deal with both internal and external environmental complexity (Godfrey-Smith, 1996). Because of these multiple factors one does not anticipate a convergence through reductionism, such as one sometimes sees in the basic sciences (Flanagan, 1997).2 Such reductionism has sometimes been referred to as physics envy. On the other hand, the logical implication of such a framework is not necessarily subjectivity, relativism, arbitrariness, or material utility, but more toward what Aristotle described as phronesis or practical wisdom. It should thus not be unexpected that the paradigm also is compatible with the categories of what is sometimes called a “folk psychology,” which is based on introspection and accumulated experience. This framework of an ecological organic paradigm is not entirely new for it is based in part, for example, on Aristotle’s sense of the composite whole and it addresses the problem of the one and the many. It is a reconsideration of an old and common idea.