‘At the core of both our nature, and our way of being within nature, is a relentless, collective conversation about what is good and what is true.’ Richard Bernstein

Richard J. Bernstein. The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud. New York: Polity Books, 2022

During the past few decades, our practices have been destroying nature, and they are likely to destroy the human species unless we dramatically change human behavior. The serious issue we face today is whether there are sufficient efforts to meet the present\ crisis. Frankly, the evidence is discouraging. There is, of course, lots of talk about climate change and the destruction of the earth by fossil fuels. And there are gestures toward meeting these challenges. But the actions taken by the governments are weak and] insufficient in light of the catastrophe that is already the extreme weather changes that seem to erupt every day. . . .My basic plea is for honesty and serious realism—realism that requires rethinking the relation of humans and nature today. My hope is that my study may help in this process. (VN 205–8

Nature’s Philosophical Journey

Richard J. Bernstein’s The Vicissitudes of Nature is an ambitious and illuminating work tracing the evolution of the concept of nature in modern Western philosophy. Bernstein traces a dialectical movement from Baruch Spinoza’s rationalist identification of God, substance, and nature as a deterministic whole, through David Hume’s empiricist skepticism and naturalistic science of man, to Immanuel Kant’s attempt to mediate scientific determinism and human freedom, and G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectical inversion that presents nature as reason’s self-externalization returning to itself as Spirit. In the book’s second part, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud challenge these philosophies by rejecting consciousness as a starting point, instead grounding their thought in material practice, radical immanence, and unconscious drives, respectively. Bernstein proves an expert guide, carefully reconstructing each thinker’s arguments with remarkable clarity and tracing unexpected connections between seemingly disparate philosophers.

While this historical reconstruction is masterful, several critical concerns emerge that warrant deeper examination. Bernstein’s systematic approach, though analytically powerful, occasionally smooths over internal tensions and inconsistencies within individual thinkers’ corpuses. The framework of immanence versus transcendence, while useful, can feel procrustean when applied too rigidly across such diverse philosophical projects.

More significantly, Bernstein’s treatment of connections between thinkers sometimes relies on superficial affinities rather than genuine philosophical convergence. The brotherhood he ascribes to Spinoza and Freud illustrates this problem clearly. While both were secular Jews who developed naturalistic worldviews, their philosophical differences run deeper than Bernstein acknowledges. Freud felt solidarity with Spinoza based on shared identity and marginalization, but their conceptions of nature, knowledge, and love diverge fundamentally. Spinoza’s rationalist optimism about human understanding contrasts sharply with Freud’s tragic vision of unconscious conflict and the limits of rational self-knowledge. Where Spinoza sees knowledge as potentially liberating us from emotional bondage, Freud views the unconscious as an inexorable force that reason can at best partially illuminate through interpretation.

Similarly, Bernstein’s analysis of Nietzsche reveals tensions between descriptive and normative claims that deserve greater scrutiny. Nietzsche’s immanent naturalism and deterministic view of the self sits uneasily with his ethic of creative self-overcoming and self-responsibility. How can we reconcile his genealogical demonstration that moral values emerge from natural-historical processes with his call for active transvaluation? Bernstein acknowledges this tension but doesn’t fully explore its implications for Nietzsche’s coherence as a philosopher of nature.

Perhaps most importantly, Bernstein’s historical reconstruction leaves crucial contemporary questions inadequately addressed. His recovery of Enlightenment debates between naturalism and its critics provides valuable resources, but what new possibilities emerge after relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Darwinian revolution? The twentieth century fundamentally transformed our understanding of nature’s basic character—from deterministic mechanism to probabilistic processes, from static substance to dynamic evolution, from simple reductionism to emergent complexity.

These developments suggest that the very category of Nature with a capital N may require fundamental reconceptualization. Process metaphysics, complexity theory, ecological thinking, and new materialisms have opened philosophical spaces that transcend the traditional oppositions—immanence versus transcendence, mechanism versus teleology, naturalism versus humanism—that structure Bernstein’s analysis. How might these contemporary developments reframe the questions driving modern philosophy of nature? What would a postmechanistic naturalism look like that incorporates insights from systems theory, evolutionary biology, and ecological science?

A more historicist approach, attuned to the social and political contexts of philosophical production, might also yield a fuller picture. The thinkers Bernstein examines were responding not merely to abstract philosophical problems but to concrete historical crises—the scientific revolution, industrialization, political upheaval, cultural secularization. Understanding how these contexts shaped their conceptions of nature could illuminate both the possibilities and limitations of their contributions to contemporary ecological thinking.

These critical observations should not diminish appreciation for Bernstein’s achievement. The Vicissitudes of Nature remains an important work of philosophical scholarship that illuminates how a diverse cast of thinkers grappled with nature, science, and their implications for human self-understanding. Writing in lucid, jargon-free prose, Bernstein provides essential historical grounding for contemporary debates. In an era of ecological crisis, his patient efforts to reconstruct the dialectic of Enlightenment naturalism offer vital resources for reimagining our place in the web of life—even if that reimagining must ultimately move beyond the frameworks his historical subjects bequeathed us.

https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/alex_betancourt_reviews_the_vicissitudes_of_nature/

++++++++++