The Philosopher’s Poet

This chapter presents a reading of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago that brings out the philosophy that permeates the work and compares it with the philosophical cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead. Whereas Whitehead wears his speculative cosmology on his sleeve, Pasternak cloaks his philosophy in his art, in his characters and their conversations, and in the imaginative world he creates. The dramatic and relational focus of the novel is “life in others,” which means that life essentially involves both worldly activity and worldly “suffering,” or undergoing. This is behind the bewildering interconnections and mutual influences of Doctor Zhivago’s characters. The mutual penetration and real connection of lives, each in the other, is the backbone of the novel, undergirding its tragic vision. Doctor Zhivago is the story of individual, interconnected lives crucifying and resurrecting one another, again and again. The final ingredient of Pasternak’s cosmic harmony, without which we cannot fully understand the interrelations of life, death, form, and art, is eros, love. Pasternak’s cosmological vision is that individuals are essentially involved with one another and with the universe abroad. Life renews itself out of death, and human love and creative activity are the truest and fullest expressions of cosmic reality.

Prelude

In this autobiographical essay Donnelley explores the animating childhood experiences growing up in Libertyville, Illinois, that have informed and propelled his relationship to nature and to the vocation of philosophy. The essay begins with a reminiscence of playing Little League baseball on makeshift fields bordered by cow pastures, a cemetery, and a trailer park. This becomes a metaphor for the life of engaged thinking and acting on big ideas concerning the human place in and impact on nature as a larger reality of life and meaning. Such a life requires openness to the disciplines of ontology and cosmology. The remainder of the essay is a discussion of the history and development of cosmological thinking since the pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Heraclitus, through seventeenth-century philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza, and finally post-Darwinian thinkers such as Ernst Mayr and Aldo Leopold.

Introduction

This book is written with the knowledge that serious cancer will foreshorten the author’s life. It is an expression of a life of exploring ideas and nature. And it is an affirmation of the essential unity of human beings and a natural order that is valuable and good. Following Alfred North Whitehead, this order can be called “nature alive.” The author has been shaped by an impulse to explore the life of the mind and the recognition of his own fundamental ignorance. The writing and contents of the book are shaped by two themes. One, “living waters,” centres on the direct experience with the nonhuman world, particularly fly-fishing, and is a metaphor for the fact that the natural world is fluid and dynamic, not completed and static. The second theme is “magic mountains,” which refers to the influence that important philosophical thinkers have had on the author’s thinking and self-identity. Each chapter in the book is designed to reveal the development of this tradition of questions and ideas and to invite readers to carry that dialogue further in their own lives and minds.

Nature Alive in Spinoza and Whitehead

A struggle that began in the seventeenth century is still being waged today. It pits a mechanistic, reductionistic worldview that sets human being apart from the rest of being and mind or cognition apart from the rest of natural reality, on the one side, against a worldview that aims at ontological monism and the relational being of humans and nature, on the other. This chapter presents the terms and aspects of this debate in a close discussion of Descartes and then considers the work of Spinoza and Whitehead against the background of Cartesian thought. Descartes severs an ontological connection between thought and material being, thereby making it impossible to talk about an interconnected web of being. Spinoza rejects this and views all forms of life and material being as finite manifestations of one unbounded active being, Nature (God).

What Philosophic Cosmology Can Teach Us

This chapter introduces the fourth and most philosophical section of the book, which offers a history of the development of cosmology or natural philosophy primarily in the work of Spinoza, Whitehead, Jonas, and Mayr. The aim is to clarify an ecological alternative to the dominant contemporary legacy of Cartesian dualism and mechanistic materialism. In addition to providing a prelude to the history and synthesis offered in following chapters, this chapter also addresses the important question of the relationship between natural philosophy and ethics.

Editors’ Afterword

Strachan Donnelley was working to complete this book at the time of his death in 2008. The manuscript that he left in our care was composed of several essays that had been published in scattered journals and book chapters and of many new essays, previously unpublished, that he had written during a remarkably productive period in the last five years of his life. It fell to us to put the finishing editorial touches on this work and to group the chapters in an order of presentation that we hoped would weave together the two genres at which he excelled—the personal, observational storytelling of an outdoorsman whose copy of ...

Neo-Darwinian Cosmologies

In this chapter, Donnelley argues that evolutionary theory constitutes one of the most profound revolutions in the whole history of Western science and philosophy. The relational cosmology developed by Spinoza and Whitehead had then to take a decisive turn when it came into contact with an evolutionary perspective and was more explicated as a philosophy of organic life. This is exemplified, for Donnelley, in the work of Hans Jonas, who developed a new philosophy of organic life, and Ernst Mayr, who was instrumental in showing the genetic basis of Darwinian natural selection and who contributed as well as a historian and philosopher of science. Donnelley reviews the similarities and differences of these two thinkers in terms of materialism, causation, and the relationship between natural science and natural philosophy. He concludes that Mayr is the philosopher and ethical champion of natural and human becoming. Jonas, on the other hand, is the philosopher and ethical champion of organic and human being. He is less stunned by the innumerable material forms and processes of life than by the very fact of life itself and especially organic life’s capacity for moral responsibility, evidenced in human beings.

Leopold’s Darwin

This chapter contains one of the most detailed and extended discussions of the thought of Aldo Leopold in the book. Leopold represents a synthesis of evolutionary, Darwinian thought and an ecological and conservation perspective. The issues Leopold addressed are perennial ones in the history of Western philosophy. He stressed not timeless essence and transcendence but dynamic worldliness, adaptation, and transformation. His thought is not dogmatic or certain but nuanced and ambivalent. It has a scientific and a spiritual side. In the end Leopold can help us be guided by the demands of our own humanity and our historical natural home, and we can be moved by broad, generous, and nuanced senses of moral care, fairness, and respect for the various forms and capacities of life.

Leopold’s Wildness

The premise of this chapter is that Aldo Leopold’s notion of a land ethic cannot be understood apart from his broader worldview of the relationship between humans and nature. The question of the reintroduction of wolves into the Adirondack region provides a practical context for an appreciation of Leopold’s perspective. This is a long-term, holistic, evolutionary, and dynamic perspective, in which the role of large predator species is integral. The perspective also includes the essential element of the wild, or wildness. This enlarged view of a question such as the reintroduction of wolves into a region is transformative and puts short-term human interests and fears in their place.

Hunting Hennepin’s Windblown Bottom

Periodic duck-hunting trips were a staple of the Donnelley family when the author was growing up near Hennepin, Illinois. A detailed reminiscence of that experience in this chapter provides the gateway to a meditation on the question of why human beings find it so difficult to see themselves as members of a biotic community and to follow Aldo Leopold’s land ethic of respect and care for that community. The author concludes that in duck hunting as a boy he encountered deep-time, well-honed predator instincts, interests, and satisfactions. He was engaged in predator-prey relations that psychologically and behaviorally bound him to natural landscapes. As a result, for the rest of his life he has recognized his “aboriginal” membership in historically deep, biotic communities.