Nature and its Transformations

Abstract

EVERY VIEW of nature connotes a view of the human subject as knower I and moral agent, and it is my purpose to explore the implications of this fact. The subjectivity implied by an objective claim cannot, however, be studied by making it the object of some form of direct inquiry like introspection, in which data are collected, analyzed, and finally subsumed under a theory. The subject as subject cannot, of course, be the object of direct scrutiny by the subject. By studying the forms of objectivity assumed to be present in nature, one can, however, infer the forms of subjectivity that are presupposed. Inquiry of this kind must proceed according to phenomenological method, the purpose of which is to uncover the noetic pole (that is, the vector of research and inquiry) constitutive, with the noematic (or objective) pole, of the noeticnoematic (subject-object) intentionality structure within which the form of the question and the form of the answer mutually determine one another. Sedimented in common usage are two meanings for nature: one opposes it to the artificial, the man-made; the other opposes it to mind or spirit, the domain of meaning, culture, and values. Let me call the first the Aristotelian or romantic sediment, where nature is conceived as impregnated with rational purpose and striving, manifesting the logos of a cosmic organism—a logos that man can co-operate with for his good or violate to his destruction. In this view, man is a part of nature, illuminated spiritually by nature's logos and subject to its moral imperatives. His freedom to modify the course of nature by artificial interventions is limited by objective rules stemming from the supreme imperative of maintaining the harmony of nature as a whole. Christianity came to assimilate this view when it took over the cultural world of Greece and Rome. Nature's logos became the divine ideas, and the natural (or moral) law became the participation by man in God's eternal law. Man was not seen as creative of nature's logoi or of any part of the natural law. These were given to him as a body of articulated and preordained goals furnished with divine sanctions and communicated through the light of natural reason aided by the supernatural grace of God. The second meaning of nature has its source in the scientific movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which, inspired by 1 For a historical study of the concept of nature, see R. G. Collingwood's classic work The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945).