Following Nature? The Transition from an Aesthetics of Nature to an Ethics of Nature in Schelling

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

Order of Nature–Order of Love:Arguments against a Naturalistic (Mis-)Interpretation of Humanae Vitae Andrzej Kuciński The Problem: Naturalistic (Mis-)Interpretation On May 13, 2010, during the second Ecumenical Church Convention in Munich, Margot Käßmann, the former Chair of the Protestant Church in Germany, praised the "birth control pill" as a "gift from God" while speaking at the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady in Munich. Her rationale was that "it is about the preservation of life, of freedom, which doesn't have to immediately degenerate into pornography, as much as the sexualization of our society is, of course, a problem."1 In contrast, the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, authored by Paul VI, states: "Similarly excluded is any action which, either before, or at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means."2 This conclusion is based on the natural law and the Church's teaching that "each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life."3 These positions represent two contradictory views: On the one hand "life and freedom," which claims to reflect the attitude toward life of today's European mainstream, and on the other hand, supposedly restrictive and moralizing rules and judgments, which appear out of step with reality. The serious challenge the encyclical letter was to the mainstream attitude [End Page 21] toward life, was demonstrated by the sharp protests which followed with unprecedented vehemence the publication of the papal letter, particularly in northern European countries. The encyclical letter became a genuine symbol of contradiction. One allegation that stood out among the various points of criticism was that of naturalism or biologism, according to which the Pope had translated biological laws into moral imperatives. In German-language literature, the opposition to the encyclical letter was seen as, among other things, a symptom of a departure from the neo-Scholastic approach to natural law theory with its focus on objective beings. The precepts of natural law in matters relating to contraception were criticized for defending a reactionary concept of nature, which had allegedly been adopted from times gone by, irrespective of later developments in science and society.4 In addition, general doubts were expressed with regard to the competence of the magisterium in matters relating to sexual morality. It was therefore argued that: "The encyclical Humanae vitae, which is based on a crude, to some extent virtually biologistic concept of nature, has contributed to discrediting the precepts of natural law in the Catholic sphere, as well."5 The Pope's reference to the physiological processes relating to the transmission of human life led to the fixation on the biological perspective: "If reference is made to the 'laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman' (Paragraph 12) and to something 'repugnant to the nature of man and of woman' (Paragraph 13) or to the 'natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system' (Paragraph 16), this is clearly of a biological [End Page 22] nature; on this basis, birth control through artificial means is condemned as an intrinsically immoral act."6 However, if a conclusion deduced from biology is applied to ethics, the encyclical letter can be criticized for using the naturalistic fallacy that an "is" necessarily leads directly to an "ought." However, suggestions that the content of the encyclical is naturalistic, which consequently leads to a rejection of the precepts of natural law on which the encyclical hinges, must be emphatically rejected in the name of common sense (and all the more if the Church's teachings are to be dealt with in good faith). If something which had previously been incorrectly defined is later rejected, then this is an inevitable consequence of this erroneous premise. This would mean attributing an interpretation to the positions of the Church's teachings that the Church itself, in fact, does not advocate, simply for the sake of questioning said positions and eliminating them as legitimate courses of action. The fallacy of biologism, I would argue, results from a flawed analysis of the concept of nature on which Humanae Vitae is based. This essay...

How natural is natural deduction?– Gentzen's system of natural deduction intends to fit logical rules to the effective mathematical reasoning in order to overcome the artificiality of deductions in axiomatic systems (¶ 2). In spite of this reform some of Gentzen's rules for natural deduction are criticised by psychologists and natural language philosophers for remaining unnatural. The criticism focuses on the principle of extensionality and on formalism of logic (¶ 3). After sketching the criticism relatively to the main rules, I argue that the criteria of economy, simplicity, pertinence etc., on which the objections are based, transcend the strict domain of logic and apply to arguments in general (¶ 4). (¶ 5) deals with Frege's critique of the concept of naturalness as regards logic. It is shown that this concept means a regression into psychologism and is exposed to the same difficulties as are: relativity, lack of precision, the error of arguing from `is' to `ought' (the naturalistic fallacy). Despite of these, the concept of naturalness plays the role of a diffuse ideal which favours the construction of alternative deductive systems in contrast to the platonic conception of logic (¶ 6).

Against <i>what</i>?

In this article I consider contemporary philosophical conceptions of human nature from the point of view of the ideal of gender equality. My main argument is that an essentialist account of human nature, unlike what I take to be its two main alternatives (the subjectivist account and the cultural account), is able coherently to justify the educational pursuit of this ideal. By essentialism I refer to the idea that there are some features common to all human beings (independent of individual, cultural and historical factors) that are conducive to a good life and human flourishing. I also consider the main philosophical challenge of essentialism, the naturalistic fallacy, and the ways in which contemporary versions of essentialism might escape this charge.

Frogs and Salamanders as Agents of Romanticisms Dorothee Ostmeier (bio) “Nicht die Kinder bloß, speist man mit Märchen ab”Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise1 In his lectures at Johns Hopkins Rainer Nägele always astounded me with associations that linked, for example, dogs to melancholy. Of course, this association was not new, but Nägele filtered it out of the Dürer and Benjamin contexts, brought it to the forefront, and fashioned the discussion of the motif so that it stuck with me until now.2 Nägele also used to refer to Sherlock Holmes’ success in detecting what is hidden in all signs. Just as Holmes warned his assistant Watson, Nägele warned us: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”3 The more I teach the more I appreciate this training in drawing surprising connections. This is perhaps one reason why I am writing today about frogs and salamanders as agents of diverse concepts of Natur-, Geist- and Kulturgeschichten, natural history, intellectual history, and cultural history, in the early 19th century. I will first discuss how the Grimm brothers’ concept of nature as culture and their re-vision of their teacher Lorenz Oken’s concept of nature philosophy (Naturphilosophie) as nature poetry (Naturpoesie) is reflected in the tale “The Frog King” (Der Froschkönig). I will then [End Page 670] contrast the Grimms’ frog with the salamander in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Golden Pot.” Hoffmann’s figuration of a fantastic nature—or a natural fantastic—turns the concept of nature poetry upside down. As an enigmatic allegory of the fantastic, the salamander Archivarius Lindhorst replaces the logical structure of the Grimms’ wonder tale through colorful and witty incomprehensibility. I will ask about the functions of these instantiations of the fantastic in the conceptualization of nature in the 19th century. In Grimm and Hoffmann “nature” is portrayed as an agent that transgresses the nature/culture divide as it promotes the superiority of man throughout the rational systems of the Enlightenment.4 In some of the Grimms’ wonder tales, nature promotes and activates social judgment: Marginal figures become established and socially established figures become marginalized. In order to achieve these wondrous changes, nature motifs are at times linked to chance. Hoffmann’s tale subverts this “chance magic” by inscribing the complexity of the fantastic into nature. In 1809 Lorenz Oken published his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie5, a very detailed and complex system that he dedicated to his friends Friedrich Schelling and Henrik Steffens. The 1809 preface reads like a defense of the term “nature philosophy” against its enemies. Objecting to the accusation of it as a “leere Fantasie” (Oken 1909, V) he asks “den naturforschenden Gelehrten” (Oken 1909, VI)) for more respect and counteracts their misconceptions of his project by explaining his rhetorical strategies: “Ich darf voraussetzen, dass jedermann wisse, dass das, was ich von Gott sage, symbolisch ist, und dass niemand wähne, Gott sei nichts anderes, als das Feuer, was da lodert, das Wasser, was da fliesst, wenn ich mich auf diese Art ausdrücke”(Oken 1909, VI). Parts should not be seen as the whole, and he warns, for example, of viewing the “ganze Thierreich” as “theilweis producirte Mensch”. As the logic of part and whole informs Oken’s concept of nature in general, it is also applied to his zoological system. The section on zoology introduces actual animals as independent as well as parts of the animal kingdom, and the animal kingdom again as essentially one big animal with the human being as the highest part (Oken 1843, 396). Oken distinguishes between the actual animal and the concept of the animal that circumscribes [End Page 671] all animals, including the human being. Paragraphs 3067 to 3070 differentiate between Thierreich, ein Thier, Thierheit, allgemeiner Thierleib, höchstes Thier, Mensch (Oken 1843, 396). This sequence of terms indicates the fluid borders between the various concepts of the animal. All beings are independent and whole and at the same time a part of another whole. Oken registers frogs and salamanders as parts of the second land, fourth circle of Fleischtiere (Oken 1843, 432), not as Eingeweide- Haut- oder Gefühlstiere (Oken 1843...

The polyphony of nature

Liberal naturalism: Wittgenstein and McDowell

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: The Aesthetics of Nature

Philosophy at Its Origin: Walter Benjamin’s Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels Beatrice Hanssen Already in one of his early lectures, “The Idea of Natural History,”1 Adorno emphasized how radical the turn was that Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama had brought about in the philosophy of history. Presented to the Kantgesellschaft at Frankfurt in 1932, 2 Adorno’s lecture polemicized against the conception of history dominant in contemporary philosophical schools, notably in phenomenology and Heidegger’s new ontology. Criticizing their inability to come to a dialectical conception of nature and history, Adorno set it as the lecture’s program to introduce what he called a fundamental “ontological transformation of the philosophy of history.” 3 The lecture first sketched the development from Max Scheler’s early phenomenology, which still remained grafted onto the Platonic dualism between a static realm of immutable Ideas and historical contingency, to the shift introduced by Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), whose concept of ‘historicity’ recognized the inextricable entwining of nature and history. But by turning historicity into an existential structure and by anchoring the new ontology in a hermeneutics of meaning (Sinn), Heidegger’s philosophy inadvertently remained hampered by the subjectivistic assumptions of transcendental philosophy. Instead, it was Benjamin’s study of the baroque Trauerspiel, which, in focusing on the decay and transience of natural history (Naturgeschichte), had initiated the turn to a fundamentally different, anti-idealistic form of history. By suggesting that history and nature were commensurable in the moment of transience [End Page 809] that marked both, the Trauerspielbuch, Adorno contended, had annulled the idealistic antithesis between history and necessity, human freedom and nature. Welding together nature and history, ‘natural history’ obviated the traditional aporias between both, pointing instead to their originary dialectical interplay. Moreover, the Trauerspielbuch renounced the conception of a reality saturated with meaning, turning instead to a reified, alienated world and to the facies hippocratica of history, whose figure was allegory. Indeed, in Benjamin’s semiotics of allegory and in his practice of reading the ruins of history, Adorno recognized a revolutionary departure from the transcendental legacy that still implicitly informed Heidegger’s hermeneutics. With this philosophical assessment of Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift, Adorno was among the few who early on identified its radical implications. However, while Benjamin’s theory of allegory in its anti-systematic, anti-idealistic force has since found general acceptance and applications, the study’s epistemo-critical prologue (erkenntniskritische Vorrede) by contrast has often been regarded as hermetic or arcane. Meant as a decisive contribution to the methodological debates that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Benjamin’s introduction advanced a “Platonic theory of science,” 4 eine platonisch auf Darstellung der Wesenheiten gerichtete Wissenschaftstheorie (O 40; GS I.1., 221), which was to provide the foundation for philosophy, the philosophy of history and philosophical aesthetics. But when seen from a contemporary perspective, the prologue’s return to Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, which it called “philosophy at its origin”5 (O 30; GS I.1, 209), must seem not so much untimely as curiously out of time as the entry to a study that would come to be regarded as one of the cornerstones of modernity. Nor is it readily apparent how such a return to Platonism could be reconciled with a radically new philosophy of history—a point already made by an early critic who saw in what he considered to be Benjamin’s “Pseudoplatonism,” “the most dangerous malady that can befall anyone who deals with historical matters either ex professo or out of his own inclination.” 6 In light of these apparent contradictory moments, which seem to divide the prologue from the main study, the following analysis proposes to return to the prologue of the Trauerspielbuch in order more closely to examine the conception of history it offers. In particular, I will examine to what degree Benjamin intended to provide a fundamental critique of contemporary theories of history and [End Page 810] their roots in subject philosophy by means of the introduction of two new historical categories, namely, those of the ‘origin’ and ‘natural history’ (natürliche Geschichte). 7 For although the prologue circles back to Plato, it cannot...

This paper argues that one of the key differences between Schelling and Hegel concerns the potential within their respective systems to conceive the history of nature as philosophically significant. The author begins by considering the late Schelling's critique of Hegel in order to elucidate the difference between an ontology of nature and a philosophical history of nature. With this distinction in mind, he turns to the early Schelling's philosophy of nature and argue that, despite his insistence on the atemporal character of nature's system of stages, the early Schelling nevertheless hints at the ontological significance of nature's history. He goes on to interpret Hegel's rejection of the idea that natural history might be of significance to an ontology of nature, and argues that this view must be understood in light of Hegel's conception of nature as "self-external reason." He concludes by suggesting that it is only in Schelling's middle period—and, in particular, in the Ages of the World—that the rationally necessary development from inorganic nature to life and spirit is presented as a historical development, making this period of Schelling's thought the high point of idealist philosophy of nature.

The objective of this study is to develop naturalistic knit designs inspired by Yann Arthus-Bertrand's works. For this purpose, we examined the present style of naturalism and history of naturalism though literature research, and then developed designs. The results are as follows: First, as scientific realism originated from a philosophical concept was adopted in literature and other genres, its meanings have been altered and comprehensively expanded according to the genres of which the term is being used. Naturalism of the modern times carries strong message of ecology and environmental protection. Second, the modern naturalism in fashion is manifested in expressing the image of nature and plasticity, instead of a mere use of the natural materials. As the aspects of ecology become more significant, elements of retro, recycle, or grunge are additionally integrated in fashion. Third, Naturalism expressed in knitwear is similar with that of other clothing in terms of color and textile, however, silhouette in knitwear is unique in its general naturalness and flowing effects. Embroidery, knitting of Jacquard and Intarsia, or crochet is used to express forms of objects from nature. Visual effects regardless of the contents of yarn, and pattern effects after knitting by using yarn, have influences on the material. Forth, the eight knit designs in expressing naturalism presented in this study took a motif from the works of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. They were created by rendering rhythm of the landscape with emphasis on brown color. Contour and surface touch were expressed through yarn and the structure of knit.

To modern scholars, the naturalistic fallacy looks out of place in Greco-Roman antiquity owing to the robust associations between nature, especially human nature, and moral norms. Yet nature was understood by ancient authors not only as a norm but also as a form of necessity. The Greco-Roman philosophical schools grappled with how to reconcile the idea that human nature is given with the idea that it is a goal to be reached. This essay looks at the Stoic concept of oikeiōsis as one strategy for effecting such a reconciliation. Drawing on natural history, these Stoic sources used examples of animal behavior to illustrate a process whereby nature "entrusts" all animals, including humans, with the care of their own survival. Nature is thus both what is given to the animal and what the animal achieves in a powerful but also problematic synthesis here called the "naturalistic fantasy".

Aliens — as we know them

According to neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the dominant causal role in biological evolution is played by historical contingencies, both at the level of spontaneous variation and at the level of limited environmental resources. The natural selection, as well as evolution based on it, are thus supposed to be of essentially historical nature. The omnipresence of biological convergences challenges this view. We propose that law-like universal constraints on internal organismic organization as well as on their environment, originating from universal characteristics of nonlinear and complex dynamical systems, may confer some of the observed regularity and repeatability of evolutionary patterns. The testing of this general hypothesis requires the development of a new field of theoretical and empirical research procedures.