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Nature (philosophy)
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Nature is a word used in two major sets of ways, which are inter-connected in a complex way, for reasons related to the history of science, epistemology and metaphysics, particularly in Western Civilization.
1. In modern scientific writing "nature" refers to all directly observable phenomena of the "physical" or material universe, and it is contrasted only with any other sort of existence, such as spiritual or supernatural existence. In a scientific text, the unqualified term “nature” normally means the same as “the cosmos” or “the universe”.
2.
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Nature is a word used in two major sets of ways, which are inter-connected in a complex way, for reasons related to the history of science, epistemology and metaphysics, particularly in Western Civilization.
1. In modern scientific writing "nature" refers to all directly observable phenomena of the "physical" or material universe, and it is contrasted only with any other sort of existence, such as spiritual or supernatural existence. In a scientific text, the unqualified term “nature” normally means the same as “the cosmos” or “the universe”.
2. Historically, and also in casual speech, “nature” does not include all things, because it excludes the artificial or man-made. For example it generally does not include manufactured objects, and also generally does not include human interaction. In this case, the unqualified term “nature” generally means the same as “wilderness” or “the Natural environment”.
Connected to this second meaning, "nature" also refers to the essential properties of any particular type of thing, which exist apart from particular things, for example in the phrase "human nature".
To the extent that people might see Nature or the "natures" of things separate from the things themselves, for example if they would believe that human nature exists separately from humans, then they are in conflict with the modern scientific understanding of Nature, and their own understanding hearkens back to a debate within Classical Greek philosophy, which has never quite been resolved.
Classical Nature and Aristotelian Metaphysics
According to Leo Strauss, the beginning of Western philosophy involved the "discovery or invention of nature" and the "pre-philosophical equivalent of nature" was supplied by "such notions as 'custom' or 'ways'". In ancient Greek philosophy on the other hand, Nature or natures are ways that are "really universal" "in all times and places". What makes nature different is that it presupposes not only that not all customs and ways are equal, but also that one can "find one's bearings in the cosmos" "on the basis of inquiry" (not for example on the basis of traditions or religion). To put this "discovery or invention" into the traditional terminology, what is "by nature" is contrasted to what is "by convention". The concept of nature taken this far remains a strong tradition in modern western thinking. Science, according to Strauss' commentary of Western history is the contemplation of nature, while technology was or is an attempt to imitate it.
Going further, the philosophical concept of nature or natures as a special type of causation - for example that the way particular humans are is partly caused by something called "human nature" is an essential step towards Aristotle's teaching concerning causation, which became standard in all Western philosophy until the arrival of modern science.
 - The material cause is the "raw material" - the matter which undergoes change. One of the causes of a statue being what it is might be that it is bronze. All meanings of the word nature encompass this simple meaning.
- The efficient cause is the motion of another thing, which makes a thing change, for example a chisel hitting a rock causes a chip to break off. This is the most obvious way in which cause and effect works, as in the descriptions of modern science. But according to Aristotle, this does not yet explain that of which the motion is, and we must "apply ourselves to the question whether there is any other cause per se besides matter".
- The formal cause is the form or idea which serves as a template towards which things develop - for example following an approach based upon Aristotle we could say that a child develops in a way partly determined by a thing called "human nature". Here, nature is a cause.
- The final cause is the aim towards which something is directed. For example a human aims at something perceived to be good, as Aristotle says in the opening lines of the Nicomachean Ethics.
The formal and final cause are an essential part of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" - his attempt to go beyond nature and explain nature itself. In practice they imply a human-like consciousness involved in the causation of all things, even things which are not man-made. Nature itself is attributed with having aims. It is in this way that according to the conception of Aristotle and others, the artificial is never natural in any simple sense - what is man-made was made according to the plans and aims of humans, not the different plans and aims of nature.
The artificial, like the conventional therefore, is within this branch of Western thought, traditionally contrasted with the natural. Technology was contrasted with science, as mentioned above. And another essential aspect to this understanding of causation was the distinction between the accidental properties of a thing and the substance - another distinction which has lost favor in the modern era, after having long been widely accepted in medieval Europe.
To describe it another way, Aristotle's doctrines definitively treated human thinking as essentially different from matter in motion, and as metaphysically special. Aristotle's argument for formal and final causes is related to a doctrine about how it is possible that people know things: "If nothing exists apart from individual things, nothing will be intelligible; everything will be sensible, and there will be no knowledge of anything—unless it be maintained that sense-perception is knowledge". Those philosophers who disagree with this reasoning therefore also see knowledge differently than Aristotle.
Aristotle then, described nature or natures as follows, in a way quite differently to modern science...
It might be argued, as indeed it has been, that this type of theory represented an over-simplifying diversion from the debates within Classical philosophy, possibly even that Aristotle saw it as a simplification or summary of the debates himself. But in any case the theory of the four causes became a standard part of any advanced education in the Middle Ages.
Modern Science and Laws of Nature: trying to avoid Metaphysics
In contrast, Modern Science took its distinctive turn with Francis Bacon, who rejected the four distinct causes, and saw Aristotle as someone who "did proceed in such a spirit of difference and contradiction towards all antiquity: undertaking not only to frame new words of science at pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all ancient wisdom". He felt that lesser known Greek philosophers such as Democritus "who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things", have been arrogantly dismissed because of Aristotelianism leading to a situation in his time wherein "the search of the physical causes hath been neglected, and passed in silence"..
And so Bacon advised...
In his Novum Organum Bacon argued that the only forms or natures we should hypothesize are the "simple" (as opposed to compound) ones such as the ways in which heat, movement, etc. work. For example in aphorism 51 he writes:
Following Bacon's advice, the scientific search for the formal cause of things is now replaced by the search for “laws of nature” or “laws of physics” in all scientific thinking. To use Aristotle’s well-known terminology these are descriptions of efficient cause, and not formal cause or final cause. It means modern science limits its hypothesizing about non-physical things to the assumption that there are regularities to the ways of all things which do not change.
These general laws, in other words, replace thinking about specific "laws", for example "human nature". In modern science, human nature is part of the same general scheme of cause and effect, obeying the same general laws, as all other things. The above-mentioned difference between accidental and substantial properties, and indeed knowledge and opinion, also disappear within this new approach that aimed to avoid metaphysics.
As Bacon knew, the term "laws of nature" was one taken from medieval Aristotelianism. St Thomas of Aquinas for example, defined law so that nature really was legislated to consciously achieve aims, like human law: "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community and promulgated". In contrast, roughly contemporary with Bacon, Hugo Grotius described the law of nature as "a rule that [can] be deduced from fixed principles by a sure process of reasoning". And later still, Montesquieu was even further from the original legal metaphor, describing laws vaguely as "the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things".
One of the most important implementors of Bacon's proposal was Thomas Hobbes, whose remarks concerning nature are particularly well-known. His most famous work, Leviathan, opens with the word "Nature" and then parenthetically defines it as "the art whereby God hath made and governes the world". Despite this pious description, he follows a Baconian approach. Following his contemporary, Descartes, Hobbes describes life itself as mechanical, caused in the same way as clockwork:
On this basis, already being established in natural science in his lifetime, Hobbes sought to discuss politics and human life in terms of "laws of nature". But in the new modern approach of Bacon and Hobbes, and before them Machiavelli (who however never clothed his criticism of the Aristotelian approach in medieval terms like "laws of nature"), such laws of nature are quite different to human laws: they no longer imply any sense of better or worse, but simply how things really are, and, when in reference to laws of human nature, what sorts of human behavior can be most relied upon.
Late Modern Nature
Having disconnected the term "law of nature" from the original medieval metaphor of human-made law, the term "law of nature" is now used less than in early modern times.
To take the critical example of human nature, as discussed in ethics and politics, once earl modern philosophers such as Hobbes had described human nature as whatever you could expect from a mechanism called a human, the point of speaking of human nature became problematic in some contexts.
In the late 18th century, Rousseau took a critical step in his Second Discourse, reasoning that human nature as we know it, rational, and with language, and so on, is a result of historical accidents, and the specific up-bringing of an individual. The consequences of this line of reasoning were to be enormous. It was all about the question of nature. In effect it was being claimed that human nature, one of the most important types of nature in Aristotelian thinking, did not exist as it had been understood to exist.
The Survival of Metaphysics
The approach of modern science, like the approach of Aristotelianism, is apparently not universally accepted by all people who accept the concept of nature as a reality which we can pursue with reason.
Bacon and other opponents of Metaphysics claim that all attempts to go explain beyond nature are bound to fall into the same errors, but Metaphysicians themselves see differences between different approaches.
Immanuel Kant for example, expressed the need for a Metaphysics in quite similar terms to Aristotle.
As in Aristotelianism then, Kantianism claims that the human mind must itself have characteristics which are beyond nature, metaphysical, in some way. Specifically Kant argued that the human mind comes ready-made with a priori programming, so to speak, which allows it to make sense of nature.
The Study of Nature without Metaphysics
Authors from Nietzsche to Richard Rorty have claimed that science, the study of nature, can and should exist without metaphysics. But this claim has always been controversial. Authors like Bacon and Hume never denied that their use of the word "nature" implied a metaphysics, but tried to follow Machiavelli's approach of talking about what works, instead of claiming to understand what seems impossible to understand.
Eastern Civilization and the Philosophical Question of Nature
The discussion so far above focuses upon the Western philosophical tradition, where the word "Nature" has a very specific history. But despite claims mentioned above to the contrary, it is not universally accepted that Greek philosophy was the one occasion upon which the concept of "Nature" was discovered and emphasized in this way.
Overall, the Western study of Oriental (especially, Far Eastern) philosophical literature has developed in three strands characterized by their respective guiding hermeneutical stances: 1) the missionary; 2) the anti-theological, "philological" Orientalist; 3) the post-modernist. Insofar as the contemporary study of Oriental philosophy remains entirely dominated by post-modernist objectives, it is difficult for academic consensus to form today in identifying the role of the question of Nature in the pre-modern Orient--all the more where the present-day mainstream scholarship of the Far East feels compelled to read and represent its "traditions" on the basis of "historicist" assumptions. Nevertheless, a considerable degree of vague consensus is available. Whether "Nature" is assumed to be an empty catchword or a real philosophical problem, by and large "Asianists" do not doubt that "Nature" held an eminent place in the "theoretical" debates of the pre-modern Far East. The very systematic critique "Nature" has been subjected to by Eastern scholars under the spell of modern ideological trends, suggests the pivotal importance of the problem of Nature in the pre-modern civilization of the Orient.
In Chinese, the term "nature" may be rendered as either ziran, or xing. The same terms appear throughout the philosophical literature of nations that adopted the Chinese script as vehicle of legislation and legal interpretation (most notably, Japan and Korea). In the earliest Chinese literary records, "Nature" appears in what we might call, a "pre-Socratic" sense; there, it is akin to "Dao", or "the Way" (in the earliest antiquity hardly distinguished from ?fa or "Law"); indeed, "the Way" is above all, "the Way of Nature" (????ziran zhi dao). The term Dao is sometimes likened to the Heraclitean Logos. However we may understand the relation between Dao and Logos, our judgment is aided by noting that in the oldest extant Chinese texts (e.g. the ????Huangdi Sijing, or "Scripture of the Yellow Emperor"), Dao (as the Dao of "nature") has at once a metaphysical and legal character, strongly suggesting that the source of legislation is to be found in the "nature" of things. While at first, the "nature" of things was intended as a volitional impulse (?zhi or ?xin), in later "Confucian" times the distinction would be stressed between mind and will, or between life and the "principle" or "mind" of life (?xing). In Mencius, for instance, life and its principle are juxtaposed in such a way as to allow later scholars to establish "mind" as a principle independent of the will of men (thus, e.g., as "the mind of nature"). But already in Confucius, the question of a natural "principle" or "standard" of interpretation of "names" is articulated in sharp terms. When Confucius seeks beyond the plane of convention or custom--when he reaches out to the roots of names--he does not find the will of gods and spirits. What he did find remains the subject of interpretation for the scholarship of thousands of years. That subject is usually called "Nature" or the "mind" thereof.
In general the "philosophical" tradition of China, may be understood as a quest for the mind of nature, and as a struggle to preserve that quest against "heretical" (??xiadao) tendencies to seek nature (or the mind thereof) outside or against the inherited forms shaping public morality--i.e. "laws" or "names". Accordingly, throughout pre-modern China, scholarship generally remains tied to political problems, or problems of legal interpretation. Metaphysical problems are understood as eminently legal problems (and vice versa), so that the interpretation or study (?xue) of Justice or Right (?yi) emerges as the philosophical activity par excellence: to ask "what is Justice?" (Confucius' favorite question), is at once to probe the "nature" (essential interiority) of "names"; it is "to know speech" (??zhiyan) at its root, i.e. in the principle of the constitution of names.
With the early rise of Buddhism in China, the debate over Nature gains a renewed stimulus. Now Nature is unequivocally appealed to as the Mind of all things, or as "Buddha-Nature" (??foxing), which is also the Mind of "the Empire" (??tianxia), or the monarchic principle common to all nations (hence the identification--defended most notably in Japan--of Buddha with the essence of the Emperor). At this point, Nature, as what is utterly "beyond" the imagination and speech alike (what "cannot be imagined or deliberated, or ????bukesiyi)--what is neither "external" nor "internal" to the sensory powers of egoic delusive appropriation--disappears in the very act of being revealed "universally". It is in the face of the threat of an eclipse of the depths or interiority of the problem of Nature from civil life (and the consequent decaying of civil life into "chaos" or ?luan), that the so-called Chan/Zen revival of "the Buddha Way" (??fodao) emerges, emphasizing the "original" coincidence of the "Buddha mind" (metaphysical) and the "everyday mind" (political): the "name" Buddha refers neither to something outside of the ego (?wo), nor to the ego as self-appropriating "poetic" faculty. The Chan debater will argue that Buddha is the "original nature/mind" of "this very ordinary mind," so that the Buddha is not the principle of constitution of an order beyond civility (public morality), but of "this very order": what is neither of the order of physical motion nor of that of nominal forms (the ego itself is assumed to be motion gathered in a nominal form), is the ordering principle of both speech and sensory experience--a principle "gathering" our common experience into nominal forms of universality that are now declared to serve as "direct pointers" (??zhi) to "the moon" (?yue) or "the original mind". The foremost task of the "student of the way" shall consist in recovering his "original mind" as the principle of the constitution of the common experience of civil men, where experience is shaped in/by the normative forms of public morality. Ultimately, Chan is no less a return to "piety" (?xiao), than it is a return to Nature as the common principle of the constitution of civil life.
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