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 Nature is a word used in two major ways, which are inter-connected in a complex way. This complexity is due to the importance of the concept in the history of science 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”.
The oldest meaning, which is compatible to some extent with both of these is also still common: "nature" refers to the essential properties of any particular type of thing.
History of the concept of natureTo understand how the different meanings developed from one historical concept, we must look at the history of the term “nature”. Trying to explain the regular “ways” of things, and how they change and exist, led to a peculiar concept of nature amongst the ancient Greeks. Western science and philosophy derives much of its peculiar character from debates arising from this ancient treatment of nature. To consider other civilizations, compare logos, tao, and dharma.
The English word derives from a Latin term, natura, which was in turn a translation of a Greek term, physis (φύσις). Natura is related to the Latin words relating to "birth", while physis relates to Greek words relating to "growth" in plants and animals. Hence the original classical concept of nature was of particular natures or “essences” of types or species of things. In the Odyssey, Homer uses the word once (its earliest known occurrence), referring to the intrinsic way of growth of a particular species of plant.
This concept was developed in many ways by early Greek philosophers. Two separate ideas of what would be opposite to a nature developed, as reflected in modern usage: on the one hand natural types are different from ones that humans invent, the artificial, and on the other hand it was different from things caused in a divine way. In both cases the natural was seen to be a different sort of causation than that which comes about through reasoning by a man or god.
Most peculiarly, discussion about nature led in classical times to an understanding by at least some philosophers that these essences or natures of particular things might exist separately themselves, and even cause things to remain true to type. In other words, natures were somehow understood as causes, and not just effects.
Most famously, Plato and Aristotle, presented the argument that there might be "forms" which are causes of the types of things we see in nature. This was explicitly a thinking-through of the implications of the pre-Socratic concept of the natures of types or species of things. But this understanding of nature was controversial from the start, and both Plato and Aristotle often seem tentative about this theory.
In contrast, modern science has come to insist upon looking at nature as a single whole. It insists on the importance of useful and/or repeatable truth (Machiavelli's new standard of "verita effetuale") and argues against the usefulness of assuming that there are natures (plural) of particular types of things, which was an understanding implicit in the older meaning of the word "nature".
Nature as understood todayAs already mentioned, in philosophy the question of nature lies at the heart of the key philosophical debates between arguments such as those sometimes called idealist and realist, as well those called determinist and those which give special position to free will. However the most important development in debate about nature is the development of modern science.
Nature in Modern Science
Francis Bacon was apparently influenced by Machiavelli in arguing that knowledge should avoid building up hypotheses based upon anything which could not be directly observed in the light of day. (Both authors wrote extensively about history and politics.) He was clearly also influenced by the debates in Europe caused by recent speculation about astronomy - for example that of Gallileo and Copernicus, which in turn seems to have looked back to classical atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius. What is new in modern times is the will to argue the case for such science in a political and public debate.
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:
51. The human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction, and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. But it is better to dissect than abstract nature; such was the method employed by the school of Democritus, which made greater progress in penetrating nature than the rest. It is best to consider matter, its conformation, and the changes of that conformation, its own action, and the law of this action or motion, for forms are a mere fiction of the human mind, unless you will call the laws of action by that name.
Following Bacon's advice, forms are now replaced by “laws of nature” or “laws of physics” in all scientific thinking. To use Aristotle’s well-known terminology concerning types of cause, these laws 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 things which do not change. Modern scientists often even argue that they have in this way avoided any sort of metaphysics. Some find this claim debatable, because by definition modern science can never prove this assumption to be true.
The result is that modern Baconian science normally sees nature, even human beings, as "matter in motion", obeying certain "laws of nature" which science seeks to understand. For this reason the most fundamental science is generally understood to be "physics" - the name for which is still recognizable as meaning that it is the study of nature.
Matter is itself commonly defined as the substance of which physical objects are composed. It constitutes the observable Universe. According to the theory of relativity there is no distinction between matter and energy, because matter can be converted to energy (see annihilation), and vice versa (see matter creation). Philosophically, matter constitutes the formless substratum of all things, which exists only potentially and from which reality is produced. In the sense of content, matter is also used in contrast to form.
Idealism and the survival of MetaphysicsModern science has also not ended Idealism, or more generally it has not ended speculation about metaphysics beyond just "laws of nature". Apart from the position of the world's main religions, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have continued to argue the case for positions in conflict with that of modern science.
Beauty in natureThe writer Stephen Fry has commented that if we look around us, anything ugly that we see will have been created by human hands; this exemplifies a widely held view that nature is intrinsically beautiful. That the beauty of nature has been celebrated by so large a proportion of our art is further proof of the strength of this association between nature and beauty. Many scientists also share the conviction that nature is beautiful; the French mathematician, Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) said:
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of quality and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp."
A common classical idea of beautiful art involves the word mimesis, which can be defined as the perfection and imitation of nature. It is in nature that the perfect is implied through symmetry, equal division, and other perfect mathematical forms and notions. Plato wrote about Socrates and his ideas about how the perfect forms of things exist, and in nature we see the copy of this eternally existing form. |