The Idea of Nature and the Nature of the Idea

Or, ideas of the idea, and the nature of nature

Although it may appear relatively straightforward, the phrase “The Idea of Nature” immediately presents us with a number of difficulties and ambiguities. What is implied when we speak of ‘ideas’ of ‘nature’? What do we mean when we say we are talking about ideas of nature, rather than just pure nature itself? What do we mean when we say we will be talking about ideas of nature, rather than ideas of ‘the world’ or ‘the environment’? In this first essay, we will reflect on these questions and others by investigating three primary topics: 1) the origin of the concept of Ideas in the work of Plato, 2) the basic form of ideas of Nature in our language in the work of Aristotle, and 3) an introduction to the history of ideas of nature in America in an essay by Leo Marx (no connection to Karl). By working through these topics, we will set the groundwork for the rest of the investigation into ideas of nature, clarifying the language we will be using throughout the course of this series of essays and giving ourselves several things to look out for during the next 13 weeks. While preparatory work like this is never going to provide us with a full picture of what nature is, what ideas are, or what the relationship between them is (those things can only come through an investigation of ideas of nature themselves), it will, I hope, help clear the way for a more level-headed consideration in the weeks to come. 

So first, where does our idea of ideas come from? Interestingly enough, from a consideration of the reality of nature. Several centuries before Plato, Greek thought began to consider the question of what nature is by referring to a more fundamental reality beneath the realm of appearances. Thales of Miletus, considered the first western ‘philosopher’, thought that everything was essentially water. That is, beneath the various things that appear in the world such as computers, humans, mountains, and puppy dogs, is a more essential reality made up of a mutable, flowing, liquid substance that manifests into the objects we encounter on a daily basis. Heraclitus argued that it was a logos, or order, that, like fire, came into being and extinguished itself in different forms. Anaximenes said it was air. Empedocles thought it was a mixture of fire, water, air, and earth. As time went on, and these answers became more and more evidently ridiculous, thinkers began to offer more abstract answers. For Anaximander, reality was essentially what he called apeiron, or a boundless substance. Parmenides said it was being itself. And so on. We’ll spend more time on these next week. But I mention them here to note that each of these thinkers therefore argued that what nature is is not what it appears to be at all, but rather only takes the form of the manifold appearances of the world through one process or another. I should note that while many people present Greek philosophy as the best way to approach things, I am beginning by drawing our attention to them simply because these solutions have had a lasting impact on the way that we think today, and understanding their position will help us understand and critique our own paths of thought more easily. That is, this isn’t the only, nor the best way to approach these issues. But understanding their logic is essential to reflecting on our own patterns of thought, which is the purpose of this course. And when we get to other ways of thinking in this semester, eastern and indigenous ways for example, it will allow us to more seamlessly integrate new positions and think in a more global manner.

Ok, with that out of the way: with Plato, however, things changed. Plato argued that a thing is, in some sense, what it appears to be. But this doesn’t mean that what it is is the sort of thing we can grasp through our senses. Objects in the world, and nature itself more generally, is best grasped when we consider their eidos, a term alternatively translated as idea, form, essence, or type. What a thing is, according to Plato, is an immaterial ‘shape’ or ‘form’ of the thing that is abstracted from all sensuousness. It is an image that we don’t see with our eyes, a shape that we cannot measure with a ruler, a definition that human language can rarely, if ever, articulate. He explained it most famously in his “Allegory of the Cave,” from Book VII of his dialogue, The Republic. Socrates, in the dialogue, asks us to imagine a group of people chained to the wall of a cave, looking at the wall in front of them. On the wall, shapes move around, interact with one another, appear and disappear. It is all the people in the cave have ever known, until one day, one of the prisoners gets free somehow and turns around. They notice that the shapes on the wall are actually shadows cast by cut-out figures in front of a dim candle. The figures are more stable, more substantial than the shadows they cast. It turns out the thing they thought was ‘reality’ was in fact just a reflection of something more real that lay behind the appearances. The free person, now curious, notices another light further behind the figures, and makes their way up toward it. Eventually, they come out of the cave altogether, and see that the figures were themselves just approximations of people and mountains and puppy dogs walking around beneath the sun, of which the candle in the cave was just a pale imitation. In this allegory, the shadows are like nature as we perceive it; the candle is like human understanding that casts light on the cut-outs, which are like human ideas and definitions; the sun, in turn, is divine understanding, which illuminates the real things themselves, the divine ideas that we can barely see when blinded by the light of the Gods. His point is that we almost never encounter ideas in their purest form, because of the limited nature of human understanding, but only infer that they exist because if they didn’t, the cut outs and the shadows would not be based on anything at all. Philosophy, for Plato, is the practice of leaving behind the appearances of nature, and seeking out the ideal forms that give shape to the world of nature as we typically understand it. Unlike the world we encounter in nature, the true nature of reality is not something that changes, coming into being and passing away like shadows in front of a candle, but exists forever in its pure state outside of experience.

What set Plato apart from the Pre-Socratics was that the true reality of things was not some other thing, like water, fire, air, apeiron, or being, but an immaterial form that gave things their definition. While water and air don’t look like mountains and puppies, the forms do, but just in a more abstract and ideal way. We grasp the idea of a thing not through the use of our senses, but through reason, through thought. Nature is, as we typically understand it, like everything else, an illusion. It is, in fact, the collection of all illusions. And to understand the idea of nature, the form of the natural world, one would have to grasp not just the form of some individual thing, but the form of the forms themselves, the way that forms are organized, how they operate, what they are. That is, one would have to understand that it is ideas that give rise to phenomena, to bodies, to experience. In the Timaeus, one of his later works that deals with cosmology and the origin of the world, Plato has Socrates explain that God gives order to the ideas, arranges them in a harmonious manner, in such a way that the physical world we encounter in our daily lives appears before us. This is the way that ideas operate, the nature of ideas. The idea of nature as a whole is, in other words, the nature of ideas. 

Now, you don’t need to believe Plato’s abstract cosmology to have your ideas of nature be affected by his account of the world. We can reject his explanation as much as you want, but we understanding of the world is still always already shaped by his ideas. They are baked into all western languages in a way that is very difficult to escape. When I say that you are affected by his ideas, I mean that in a double sense. We are affected both by the content of his ideas and by the concept of ideas themselves. The fact that we talk about Ideas at all means that we at least implicitly accept that Ideas exist. Our modern intuition of ideas is that they are mental objects that are, unlike really existing mountains, puppies, and computers out in nature, immaterial. They exist in a categorically different way than material objects in nature. This conception is at least to some degree working within the Platonic framework. To say we have ideas of something means that we implicitly believe that they are set over and against the material world, related to but fundamentally unlike objects of nature. They help us make sense of the world, but are not sensible themselves. We can only describe them using language. So even if we don’t fully agree with Plato, it’s not that we don’t believe ideas exist, we necessarily do, we just have a slightly different interpretation of how ideas exist, a different theory of ideas. What this means is that we are always already playing Plato’s game to a greater or lesser extent. We cannot escape the general framework that Plato articulated. This is why I mention him before we get to the actual content of ideas of nature that we’ll begin with next week. Plato’s influence in the very title of our class means that we should be aware of him before we get into others. I’m not saying he is any more right than anyone else, but that he has had that much of an impact on the foundations of how our language works. Language wouldn’t work the way it does without an inherent faith in the existence of ideas. Plato, in other words, is still with us. Or, as 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, and I’m paraphrasing here: Western thought is nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato. 

The first thinker to offer a critique of Plato’s theory of ideas was a student of his, a Macedonian named Aristotle. While Plato thought that the abstract science of mathematics should be the basis for our understanding of the world, Aristotle was much more interested in empirical observations, experiments, and research into the natural world. It is from him that we inherit the basic language with which we talk about nature. Again, this isn’t to say his ideas of nature are any more correct than anyone else, but that his ideas of nature had an oversized effect on the conceptions of nature that we’ll be investigating this semester. To give you a sense of the impact of his ideas, we could note that from the 3rd to approximately 16th century, he wasn’t rarely referred to as Aristotle, but instead “The Philosopher,” as in the only one. Not saying this is right, not saying this is good, just saying that for more than a thousand years, from England to the Arabian peninsula, if you wanted to study nature, you began with Aristotle. Against Plato, Aristotle argued that ideas don’t exist outside of the natural world, but rather are creations of a mind when confronted with material things. That is, we observe a bunch of big mounds of stone and earth and then decide to call them ‘mountains’, we look at little, furry, barking things and then decide to call them ‘puppies.’ Like Plato, the ideas that arise from observations of nature are still abstract, ideal objects, but they wouldn’t exist unless the material world existed first. He argued that everything is made up of two parts: ὕλη (hyle), or matter, and μορφή (morphe), or form. Without matter, things would not have any substance, and without form, they wouldn’t have any distinct shape. But to understand what a thing is, according to Aristotle, we must understand all the causes that bring it into being. Knowledge of the causes of a thing are what determine its true nature, or what it is by nature. For millennia, getting an idea of nature meant giving an account of its causes. For him, there were four fundamental types of cause, of which we have already mentioned two: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. The material cause is the easiest to understand, we just have to ask what raw material was used to make the thing. A statue of Heracles is made out of clay or stone or wood or plastic. The formal cause is the shape the thing takes. What distinguishes the sculpture of Heracles from a building is that it has the shape of a person. The efficient cause is the agent or force that arranges matter into its shape. Without a sculptor, the clay would remain a lump, or the stone a rock. 

The final cause is the most difficult to understand, and the most abstract. What final cause, or τέλος (telos), refers to is the purpose of the thing. The end or purpose of our sculpture is to present Heracles, while the end or purpose of an acorn is to become a tree. Much as with the Platonic Idea, the final cause is what we might call the essential reality of the thing, or its nature. Aristotle writes that this is what it is κατὰ φύσιν (kata physin), according to nature. This is precisely why we use the word ‘nature’ most often to describe the world. Why this class is called ‘ideas of nature’ rather than ‘ideas of ecosystems’ or ‘ideas of the universe’. Aristotle is essentially why studying the cosmos is called research into nature. He set the tone for scientific research into the material world for millennia. It is the most general, most basic term to describe “the natural world”. And discerning ‘final causes’ had been its basic form until very recently. “Nature does nothing with purpose,” according to Aristotle, everything else is purely accidental. What this term refers to is anything that is not ‘essential’. Note that the example we have been using, our sculpture of Heracles can be made with any number of materials, clay, stone, wood, plastic, and so on, and still be a statue of Heracles. The figure can have a slightly different form, with a big or small forehead, massive or modest arms, can be carrying a club or a pelt, and can even be a more abstract sculpture like those made by Alberto Giacometti, and still be a statue of Heracles. It can have any number of makers, Phidias, the most famous classical Greek sculptor, or Michaelangelo, the renaissance master, or contemporary sculptors like Louise Bourgeoise or Camille Claudel, and still be a statue of Heracles. All of these variables are important in determining the uniqueness of the sculpture, but are ultimately ‘accidental’, or not what it is by nature. We can look at any of the sculptures these variables produce and still say “that is a sculpture of Heracles.” What we cannot change is the purpose or end of the sculpture and have it still be a sculpture of Heracles. If the artist sets out to make a sculpture of Odysseus instead, then it is not a sculpture of Heracles, even if it looks a heck of a lot like him. When talking about human artifacts like sculptures, this concept of final causes is pretty straightforward. We ask what the creator intended, what their idea was, and then we judge it according to how well it seems to match up to that idea. If we think that the arms are not muscular enough, or that he should be carrying a club, or that the forehead is too big, that doesn’t mean it is not a sculpture of Heracles. It just means that we think it’s not a very good sculpture of Heracles. Just as in Plato, it is the idea of the thing, here conceived as a purpose, that determines its reality, not the matter itself. 

When talking about non-human objects, however, things get much more complicated. Sometimes it’s relatively clear what the end or purpose of a thing is in Aristotle’s system: an acorn’s purpose is to become a tree, even if it does sometimes become food instead. The purpose of a bird egg is to become a bird, even if that sometimes becomes food instead. But what is the purpose of a river? Of a forest? Of Coal? Of Nature itself? We can’t just ask the sculptor what they intended. Like Plato, Aristotle argued that we must use our reason to discern the telos of nature if we want to know what it truly is. Since the telos of a thing is always ultimately an idea, we must infer, according to Aristotle, that there are ideas within nature itself if we want to explain and understand it. For Aristotle, it is the ‘prime mover’, or ‘God,’ that dreams up all the ideas that give shape to reality. This prime mover, like Plato’s own God in the Timaeus, arranges the order of nature and causal relations through the use of ideas, here understood as purposes. Ideas, in other words, determine the nature of all things. Until Darwin, which in the grand scheme of things is extremely recent, this was the explanation given by almost all of Western thought, philosophy, theology, science, and the arts alike. If we want to understand the essence of nature, we must understand how ideas operate in nature, giving purpose to all things and creating end-oriented action in material objects. In other words, once again, understanding the idea of nature means understanding the nature of ideas. 

Just as in our discussion of Plato’s legacy earlier, you don’t need to buy into Aristotle’s whole system for your conception of the world to be deeply affected and shaped by it. Even today, when we investigate animals and their attributes, our intuition is to ask: what is that color, or appendage, or adaptation for? You don’t need to believe in an all powerful God or prime mover to legitimately ask the question. We believe we understand an animal or plant better when we say that this chameleon’s color is for camouflage, the beak of this finch is for breaking open nuts, this snake’s venom is for hunting prey. There is nothing in the animal itself that necessitates a priori these purposes, it’s just what we have observed, and then we infer, through the use of reason, nature’s or the animal’s intent. This is an idea that we use to make sense of the world, an explanation we came up with using language and concepts. With organic nature, then, purposes are built into the very structure of the way we see and understand the world thanks to Aristotle. Again, for better or worse. Likewise, when we investigate non-organic nature, we also tend to look for purposes when asking the most important questions. For Aristotle, humans’ capacity to reason, to create and set ends, sets us apart from the rest of nature. Like gods, according to him and everyone he influenced, we have a special power to see, through the use of reason, what the rest of nature is for. Because we have this capacity, he argued that our ends were often coincident with the ends of nature itself. What is coal for? Burning for power. What is the river for? Washing and drinking and turning water wheels and ferrying boats for commerce. What is the mountain for? Viewing the horizon and sometimes mining. What is nature for? Human flourishing. While these answers sound incredibly anthropocentric to our 21st century ears, they still form the basis of almost all environmental, political, and social policy in our era. We can disagree with it, but we cannot deny that the Aristotelian understanding of nature is not still with us in a deep way.

In both of these thinkers’ work, there is obviously much more nuance and depth than we can convey in just a single lecture. Millennia have been devoted to exploring and explaining these systems. But it is useful to at least give a first pass because of the fundamental role they have played in our understanding of nature, as well as their assertion of the role of ideas in understanding it. For both of them, it is not just that we understand nature through ideas, but even more essentially that nature is, in one way or another, essentially related to ideas. When we assert something “about” nature, we are at least implicitly inferring an idea at work in some given natural process or object. There’s no way around it, it’s how our language works. Ours is a substance oriented language, in which things we talk about are assigned predicates like furry and sweet. These predicates are ideas in a more or less Platonic or Aristotelian sense, in that they signify a concept which is related to the object I’m describing in the following way: my cat is furry and sweet. Other languages work in slightly different ways that do not rely so heavily on ideas. In week five, we’ll read a text by Robin Wall Kimmerer where we will see an alternative approach in Potawotami. Developing outside of the influence of western metaphysics, the Potawotami language offers what she calls a ‘grammar of animacy’ which sidesteps many of the issues present in Greek and Latin based cultures. Her argument, as we will see, is that the way our language works fundamentally shapes the way we see and interact with the world. 

The Platonic and Aristotelian influenced grammar we use is more or less implicitly dualistic. On one side, there are ideas, and on the other, the material world of nature. This not only shapes the way that we approach nature, how we grasp it, but also how we interact with nature. And because we are the kind of beings that do set ends for ourselves, it has increasingly been the case that we impose these ends on the rest of the natural world. The idea, for us as for Plato, often takes precedence over the matter it encounters. Our ideas about what nature is and what it is for dictate how we work, where we live, what we dig up, where we put our garbage, and what we cut down. In some ways, it would have been much simpler for me to just say this from the start: what we think about nature affects the way we live. But this doesn’t get at the root of what we have to contend with this semester. It isn’t just that we have to change our minds about what we think about nature in order to live with it more harmoniously. In Western systems of thought and action, ideas and nature are bound to one another in a much more essential way. Nature is affected by the way we think about it, to be sure, due to the fact that our ideas set ends and purposes for our actions, but our ideas are also shaped by the natural world as well. Nature is at work in the way we think because it sets the conditions for what we do, creating both limits and possibilities that shape the limits and possibilities of our ideas. And our ideas are at work in nature, especially in the last three hundred years, when our technological capabilities have become powerful enough to alter landscapes, climates, and ecosystems. The idea that water is for irrigation, for example, is not just an attitude we have about the world, but has physically, materially changed large regions of the world. Species extinction and climate change are ideas that have fundamentally changed the way that nature works. Capitalism, a system of human intentions, isn’t just an economic theory, but an idea that transforms massive amounts of fuel from underneath the earth into the atmosphere, moves matter and energy from one continent to another, creates sources of light and sound that affect migratory patterns, and so on. Again, it isn’t just that ideas of nature shape the way we think and act, but rather are forces that now work through the natural world. Human intentions and ideas are, in other words, forces of nature as well. Perhaps more than at any point in human history, our ideas of nature are creating a nature of ideas.

We can see this relationship between ideas and the material world at play in American history in Leo Marx’s essay, “The Idea of Nature in America.” In this essay, he traces the evolving ideas of nature from the colonial period to the late 20th century, and argues that there is a dialectical relationship between the social, political, ecological, and economic history of the United States (that is, its material history) and the ideas of nature that have been at play since the founding of the country. At the outset, he notes something that we will see ourselves throughout this class, that the “word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap.” It is like the word “time,” in that everyone has a sense of what it refers to, but whenever we start trying to explain it, we discover that it has these huge, strange, and often contradictory metaphysical assumptions built into it. He notes that it often has built into it a sense of the essential, of what things are ‘naturally’. As I argued, this is thanks to Aristotle. He begins the historical account by telling us that in the colonial period, nature was thought of as a dangerous wilderness, or as William Bradford wrote, “a hidious and desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts and wild men,” the abode of Satan that was diametrically opposed to the world of light and culture that the colonizers planned to bring from Europe. That is, as a thing separate from the world of men. And because their religion was one that believed that God had given the world to mankind to tame and control, the colonizers used this idea of nature to justify the killing of those that lived there and the transformation of the land into a landscape that looked more like that of England. They brought their ideas from the British and Dutch agricultural revolution, which saw labor as the means of changing the ‘howling wilderness’ into a new garden of Eden. 

At the time of the Revolution, when Enlightenment ideals were supplanting the last vestiges of medieval society, Americans began to think of nature less as a desolate wilderness, and more as a place of natural law. They argued that the modern, Newtonian science had demonstrated that nature operates according to mathematically precise laws which could be deduced through human thought. From this, political theorists began to claim that just as we can deduce the movement of celestial bodies using reason, we can also deduce the moral and political laws that exist by nature through reason as well. By correcting the wayward forces of both human and non-human nature to follow their “natural” courses by setting them on more precise paths, whether that means by implementing laws derived through reason or imposing ordered and scalable agricultural practices or straightening rivers to make them more passable, early Americans like Thomas Jefferson imposed their conception of nature on the world and began to think of the wild not as a place of devilry, but as a thing needing the guiding hand of human intervention. What this translated into, however, was an imposition of European and emerging American values onto non-European people worldwide. 

In Europe and America, and through colonial efforts, many other places around the globe, the Enlightenment transformed at the turn of the century into what was called a Romantic worldview. Reacting to the effects of the first industrial revolution, Romanticism saw nature, rather than human civilization, as a source of inspiration and guidance. In the United States, Marx draws our attention to the work of the Massachussetts based ‘Transcendentalists’ like Ralph Emerson and Henry Thoreau. The Transcendentalists, like the Puritans of the colonial period, saw a divide between humans and nature, but this time argued that it was culture that was corrupted, not nature. They saw the encroachment of the industrial age on natural spaces as a moral and spiritual problem, and argued for the need to allow nature to exist on its own, apart from the corrupting influence of human civilization. At the middle of the century, they began to demand the preservation of places not affected by humans, and the importance of allowing nature to remain in such a state, giving rise to the concept of nature as ‘wilderness’.

Marx notes that with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the idea that nature exists apart from humans became untenable. But also that, unfortunately, technological progress in the late 19th century did not take this lesson to heart. The economic systems of the period instead interpreted Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean that if we exert our power over the natural world, then we are, by definition, nature’s most fit species. That is, a faulty reading of Darwin’s ideas led to an idea of nature in which might makes right. From the late 19th century to roughly the 1970s, this idea of nature butted heads with the romantic idea of ‘nature as wilderness’ in battles over public lands preservation across the continent. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the modern environmental movement emerged, and began to try and reconcile the Darwinian conception of nature as an ever evolving system with the romantic conception of nature which held it to have some intrinsic value. 

This brings us roughly to the present, and Marx runs through a number of contemporary attempts to think through the ecological crisis that this history has left us with. We should add to his evaluation that we are not only inheriting the effects of this short history of American ideas of nature, but also the millennia old conceptions of nature inherited from Plato and Aristotle which created the conditions for these modern ideas of nature in the first place. Taken together, Plato, Aristotle, and Marx (who, I should mention, has no relation to Karl Marx), present us with a starting point to begin thinking about ideas of nature and their relationship to history.

One last note: This series of essays is roughly divided into two sections. These next four essays will be a survey of ancient, classical, and early medieval ideas of nature from across the globe. We will explore the ways that human civilizations have lived with natural systems, focusing specifically on how the ways that they farmed and worked more generally were both affected by and themselves affected the ecosystems and landscapes in which they existed. These sections will continue some of the themes outlined this week, in order to show in a more robust way how ideas and matter interact with one another. For the rest of the course, we will trace over the period outlined by Marx in his essay in greater detail. Beginning with the renaissance, we will see how ideas of nature changed so radically at the beginning of the colonial period, and the role that agriculture played in developing these ideas. We will see how emergent ideas of natural law in the enlightenment, and the control they promised over nature, led to the birth of an agrarian country in the United States. We will see how the technological advances of the first industrial revolution contributed to the colonization of the west, and how soil crises in the early history of the country created a perceived need for western expansion. We will read about the birth of the idea of wilderness, and the role it played in the development of American identity at the beginning of the 19th century. How modern natural and economic science in the mid-century created a vision of a competitive nature that was “red in tooth and nail”. And how ecological and economic crises of the early twentieth century created the conditions for a reevaluation of nature in the modern environmental movement. In the final week, we will review this history, and all the ideas of nature we have encountered, in order to think more critically about where this leaves us today, in a country whose idea of nature has impacted how the humans of this planet live upon it.