Larry Arnhart provides this characteristically astute response to my post below about Darwinian Conservatism. Instead of offering a genuinely postmodern view, he criticizes me for adopting a "distinctly modernist assumption of transcendendalist dualism" that traffics in the "opposition between animal nature and human will or reason". In the spirit of a "comprehensive science" as described by Leo Strauss, Arnhart recommends a more monistic approach that captures not only our natural inclinations but those that seem to resist and defy nature. However, it’s not clear to me that Arnhart’s (or Darwin’s) "naturalistic" account doesn’t achieve this comprehensiveness by refusing to take seriously the many ways in which human beings war with nature technologically and otherwise—his attempt to replace a traditional dualism with a Darwinian monism seems to simply collapse our efforts to transcend nature into an "emergent" property of nature itself. The problem with any theoretical monism is that it seems to require some measure of reductionism to fit all kinds of heterogeneous phenomena under the umbrella of a singular explanatory principle. It might be better to look for a "comprehensive" account that includes the sometimes inconsistent inclinations that make us unique and that is genuinely scientific because it takes its bearings from the experience we have ourselves and others as whole human persons.
Over at No Left Turns, Peter Lawler , our leading expert on what is right and wrong about Darwinism, also discusses Arnhart’s very interesting post.
