⁂ Concepts · Sacred · No. 183
Nature

An appearance of untouched country that was itself the product of management.

Nature

What things are of themselves, and the whole of what is not made by us - two senses that constantly interfere.

Theme
Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
Tradition
Cross-tradition
Term
φύσις · phusis
Term fixed
c. 330 BC

In plain terms

Nature does two jobs in English and they pull against each other.

In one, it names what something is of itself - the nature of iron, human nature. Aristotle's version is precise: a thing has a nature if it has within it a principle of change and rest, which is why an acorn grows and a bed does not sprout.

In the other, it names everything that is not us: forests, weather, animals, the parts of the world we did not build.

The second sense requires a line between the human and the natural, and nothing in the first sense supports one. Beavers build dams and nobody calls the dam artificial. What makes a city different is a question the word smuggles in as an answer, which is why arguments about what is natural are so often arguments about nothing.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's phusis is an internal principle of motion and rest, which distinguishes natural things from artefacts and grounds his account of natural place and natural ends.

The Stoic identification of nature with reason and with providence makes living according to nature a moral prescription, and the phrase carries a metaphysical claim rather than a preference for the outdoors.

The Chinese ziran - self-so, spontaneously so - is a genuinely different concept: not a domain but a manner, so that acting naturally means acting without imposition rather than acting in a wilderness. Sāṃkhya's prakṛti is one of two ultimate principles, active and unconscious, from which everything material and mental unfolds.

The modern nature-culture division is criticised from several directions at once: by environmental philosophy, which argues that placing humans outside nature licensed the treatment of it as a resource; and by anthropology, where Descola and others argue the division is one cosmology among several rather than a discovery.

Where you meet it

Wilderness is a legal category. The United States Wilderness Act of 1964 defines it as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

The areas designated under it were not empty. Most had been inhabited, burned, hunted and managed by Indigenous peoples for millennia, and the appearance of untouched country that impressed nineteenth-century observers was in many cases a product of that management, interrupted by removal and by the suppression of burning.

William Cronon's 1995 essay made the argument in print and was fiercely contested. The practical consequence is visible: fire suppression across designated wilderness produced fuel loads that the agencies now spend heavily to reduce, using prescribed burning that reintroduces a human practice the definition excludes.

A statute wrote a metaphysics into land management - that the natural is what humans have not touched - and the management has been correcting for it ever since.

What is actually disputed

Whether the nature-culture distinction holds.

The traditional view treats it as basic: some things are made and some are not, and the difference matters morally and scientifically. The critique is that the line is drawn by convention and drawn differently by different societies, that beaver dams and cities differ in scale rather than in kind, and that placing humans outside nature underwrites both exploitation and a sentimental conservation that protects landscapes from the people who shaped them.

Defenders reply that abandoning the distinction removes the vocabulary for saying that something has been damaged.

The appeal to nature as a moral standard is a separate and weaker matter. What is natural includes disease, predation and early death, and what is unnatural includes anaesthesia. Whatever work the concept does, supplying moral conclusions is not among it - which is the is-ought gap in its most frequently encountered form.

Commonly confused with

  • the outdoors Nature in the philosophical sense includes the nature of a triangle and of an institution.
  • the natural as good What is natural includes plague and predation. The inference from natural to good is the most common form of the is-ought error.
  • the environment The environment is what surrounds an organism. Nature carries the further claim about what is and is not made by us.

Defined against

  • Art The nature-artifice pair is the oldest form of the distinction, and every argument about what is natural depends on it holding

Philosophers

  • Aristotle Nature as an internal principle of change
  • Zhuangzi Ziran, the self-so, as a manner rather than a domain
  • Baruch Spinoza God or nature, with no distinction between them
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau The state of nature as a critical device
  • Kapila Prakṛti as one of two ultimate principles
  • Laozi Nature as what is not forced

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Cosmos c. 530 BC · Country · Teleology c. 330 BC · Change c. 500 BC · Form c. 380 BC

Phusis derives from the verb to grow, and Aristotle defines it as an internal principle of motion and rest; the sense of nature as the totality opposed to culture is a later and largely modern development.