Does the world exist? (3) On spirit, naturalism, scientism, and reductionism

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla December 22, 2025 0 comments Print

As we saw in our last entry, we must grant Gabriel that he does not conceive of the spirit and spiritual as an “immortal soul” or any similar ghostlike entity, but rather as something grounded in human thought—more specifically, in what relates to norms, values, laws, institutions, and rules of various kinds (I Am Not A Brain, ch. 1). In other words, it is not ‘thought’ in the merely biological sense in which we could say a wolf ‘thinks’ about how to catch a lamb, but in the normative sense Aristotle invoked when claiming that reason is above all what allows us to distinguish between justice and injustice. This normative rather than substantial understanding of spirit is precisely the one that has predominated in German philosophy since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and which underlies the label Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences of spirit”) for disciplines such as history, aesthetics, and philology. For Gabriel, the human self is free because it inevitably interprets itself through the lens of those norms, laws, and values, and therefore finds itself compelled not only to choose plainly (as one does when selecting socks in the morning), but to decide whether to obey or disregard such norms—to choose, in other words, between good and evil. Freedom is thus inseparable from responsibility. Moreover, history is shaped by the decisions we make, through which we may eventually create new norms. History cannot, therefore, be understood as a mere natural unfolding (like biological evolution), but rather—very much in the Hegelian sense—as the progressive development of our freedom, of our spirit.

But the truth is that Gabriel is mistaken in supposing that naturalism eliminates the spiritual as a mere fiction. Some naturalist thinkers may indeed hold such eliminativist views (e.g., Paul and Patricia Churchland), but eliminativism is not the dominant position among naturalists, nor does it logically follow from the central naturalist thesis: namely, that everything in the universe is natural, or—put differently—that only physical entities can exert causal influence on physical systems, and only according to the laws of physics. Naturalism is reductionist at an ontological level: it holds that all natural phenomena ultimately reduce to physical processes. Yet this is very different from the caricature of reduction Gabriel describes.

The most successful scientific reductions do not fit his portrayal at all. We know that temperature reduces to the average kinetic energy of molecules; that chemical properties reduce to the bonding possibilities determined by electron configuration; that biological reproduction reduces to the capacity to replicate DNA. But none of this renders concepts such as temperature, acidity, or offspring meaningless or fictitious. On the contrary, identifying their physical basis allows us to understand and discuss them with greater precision. True, uncovering deep structure sometimes reveals earlier conceptions to be erroneous: heat was not a fluid, chemistry is not governed by the planets, and one’s child does not literally “carry one’s blood.” But correcting error is progress, not loss.

Most importantly, Gabriel conflates ontological with theoretical reduction. Ontological reduction claims only that phenomena emerge from interactions among more fundamental elements. Theoretical reduction, by contrast, asserts that we should be able to explain and predict every property of higher-level phenomena using only the theories describing the lower-level domain. To accept that a flowering plant is “nothing but” molecules in complex interaction (ontological reduction) is not to believe that botany could be rewritten entirely as an appendix to a handbook of quantum mechanics (theoretical reduction). We know that a plant consists of atoms arranged in intricate patterns, but we cannot derive the concept of flower, root, leaf, seed, chloroplast, or sap from the equations of physics. This is the crucial point: one may accept naturalism and even ontological reductionism without rejecting emergent-level concepts as mere fiction. The language of botany remains indispensable to describe plants, just as the language of thought, decision, law, institution, and right remains indispensable to describe human life. Naturalism does not require that sociology, philology, art history, or anthropology be rewritten as mere corolaria to physics. Just as atoms can produce flowers under appropriate conditions, they can also produce the Odyssey, Mein Kampf, or I am not my brain—and they can produce the readers, interpreters, and actors moved by those texts. That too is nature at work.

Lastly, naturalism should not be identified either with scientism or with materialism. Regarding scientism, accepting naturalism does not require us to believe that our current knowledge of nature is close to completion, nor that every aspect of reality can be explained scientifically—science is just a human construction, limited like any other. Scientism would hold that all possible knowledge could, in principle, be theoretically reduced to the fundamental laws of physics, a prospect that will remain forever unfeasible. Naturalism, by contrast, assumes only—more modestly—that all processes in the universe, at any level, are ontologically grounded in fundamental physical processes, even if we cannot calculate, predict, or even describe them without the help of “higher-level” concepts and principles irreducible to the concepts and equations of physical theory.

As for materialism, it asserts that only physically real entities and processes exist. Naturalism, on the other hand, merely claims that within the physical universe, anything capable of exerting causal influence on something else must itself be a physical entity—a part of that same universe. Thus, naturalism does not require us to reject the existence of non-material entities such as mathematical objects or the symphonies Mozart might have composed in the nineteenth century had he lived thirty years longer in good health (considered as mere logical combinations of musical signs). What naturalism demands is only the rejection of non-material entities alleged to have causal influence on physical processes. There will be naturalists who accept materialism and others who do not—as is my case. Yet recognizing the existence of certain abstract, non-material entities does not compel us to accept all non-material entities that a fevered imagination may conjure. Unicorns, for instance, do not exist—neither on the far side of the moon nor in Markus Gabriel’s mind. What exists, at most, are drawings, thoughts, or stories about unicorns. Just as in Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images, what appears is not a pipe but a representation of a pipe, what exists in Gabriel’s mind is not a unicorn, but only a mental representation of one.