NATURALISM. – The term assumes different meanings in the classification of philosophical systems, moral doctrines, and religions. The precise sense, in each case, must be determined according to the presupposed concept of nature (q.v.). One may distinguish:
a) “Nature” as the first principle and origin of all things and phenomena. Nature, understood in this sense, stands in opposition to the idea of a transcendent and supra-mundane being. Naturalistic, therefore, will be those worldviews or religions that regard nature as a reality entirely self-sufficient, endowed with formative and creative power; such are the various forms of pantheism, materialism, hylozoism, and panpsychism.
b) “Nature” may be understood as the totality of material things, whose behavior is determined by invariable and fixed laws, in opposition to the self-determination of the free spirit. In this sense, naturalistic are anthropological and moral conceptions that subordinate man, even in his personal acts, to causal laws of the type of physical laws. Corresponding to such conceptions are theories of truth, of the good, and of religion that eliminate ideal and objective normativity and attempt to reduce it to mere factual necessity of a psychological or biological order.
c) “Nature” is also the totality of empirical data, as that which is directly accessible and observable, in opposition to meta-phenomenal or immaterial realities. According to this opposition, naturalism indicates a systematically empirical or positivistic approach, or, in the practical sphere, a conception that recognizes only ends of immediately practical and utilitarian significance.
d) “Nature,” finally, may be understood as that which corresponds to the order of the world, to the essence and powers of things: natural facts, in this sense, stand in opposition to what is supernatural or preternatural. Naturalistic, therefore, will be those doctrines that deny the possibility of miracles or the existence of a supernatural order and life, in the sense of Christian theology.
With particular reference to the philosophy of religion, naturalism or naturalism denotes theories and trends that hold religious ideas and sentiments to have arisen from certain deeply impressive experiences in the face of the phenomena of nature. In art, naturalism signifies trends that reject the idealization of reality in aesthetic representation (q.v.).
At the dawn of Western thought, there appears a form of religion in which motives arising from the experience of the numinous in nature play a very important part; this religion could develop, without discontinuity, into a religiosity in which the mysteries of the divine coincide with the mysteries of the cosmos. The deities are considered immanent to the universe; natural phenomena provoke the experience of their presence. According to Hesiod, the gods are descendants of Uranus and Gaia, begotten by the force of Eros, which is likewise a cosmic force. The innovation of the philosophers of nature (φυσικοί) with respect to this mythology consists substantially in their determination of the mysterious ground of nature with physical or ontological concepts, without thereby wishing to deprive it of its numinous character. They accentuate and express more clearly the naturalism of Greek religion. The attributes and perfections of the divine are applied to the ground of nature, and the concept of the divine no longer has any other meaning than to designate ἡ ἀρχή καὶ τὴν ἐλευθερία of the universe (cf. H. Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 5th ed., Anaximander, A 15; and this continues into the 18th century in the philosophy of J. St. Mill, A System of Logic, VI, London 1843, and of A. Bain, Mental and Moral Science, London 1868).
Naturalism assumed its clearest expressions in the Age of Enlightenment, with particular manifestations in the social, pedagogical, and religious spheres (F. de Maupertuis, Voltaire, Ch. de Montesquieu, J. J. Rousseau), later tending decisively toward materialism. J. Offroy de La Mettrie (Histoire naturelle de l'âme, The Hague 1745; L'homme machine, Leiden 1748) formulated the postulate of comprehending all psychic functions on the basis of bodily organization. The Système de la nature of d'Holbach (with the significant subtitle: Des lois du monde physique et du monde moral), which represents the most systematic exposition of naturalism of this period, defends an atomistic materialism that attributes to every body the properties of extension, spontaneous motive force, and sensibility. The materialistic naturalism of the 19th century (L. Büchner, G. Moleschott) differs from the naturalism of the Enlightenment only in its more decisively mechanistic stance.
The second half of the 19th century is characterized by evolutionism, whose foundations had been laid by Ch. Darwin (On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, London 1859; The Descent of Man, ibid. 1871). With the idea of evolution and the determination of the factors at work in it, the natural sciences seemed to have attained a breadth of vision sufficient to justify their claim to determine definitively the essence and meaning of all reality. Darwin himself attempted to derive moral phenomena from biological facts and laws. For H. Spencer (System of Synthetic Philosophy [London 1862–93]), the evolution of organic forms represents merely a special case of a general cosmic law, according to which, on ever greater scales, there occurs the passage from states of indeterminate and unconnected homogeneity to states of determined and organized heterogeneity (First Principles, pt. 2). The phenomena of morality appear in this evolution when human individuals unite to form societies; moral laws define precisely the conditions of the right balance between individual tendencies toward prosperity and happiness and the integrative and organizational tendencies of social life. Starting from quite different concerns, F. Nietzsche also arrived at a conception that granted primacy, among all values, to the values of vital strength; his critique of the moral systems of the past approaches naturalism in many respects. Among the authors who still uphold it today, J. C. Flügel (Man, Morals and Society, London 1945) and J. Huxley (The Prerequisites of Progress, Paris 1947) should be mentioned.
But naturalism was also asserting itself outside of materialistic, positivistic, and evolutionistic trends. Of particular note is post-Kantian idealism, which, having reached its highest and most comprehensive realization in the system of G. W. F. Hegel, turned, with the so-called “Young Hegelians,” toward decidedly naturalistic conceptions. L. Feuerbach (1804–72) objected to Hegel’s philosophy that it was now necessary to concretize and materialize even the “Logos,” the formative principle of ideas, and to overcome the dualism between the sensible world and the ideal world (Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie, in Werke, II, Leipzig 1846–66, pp. 185–232; cf. Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie, ibid. 1842, pp. 244–68). Sensible existence is the only mode of being that is truly real; religion, which implies personal relations with a transcendent reality, can only be an illusion produced by misinterpreted desires (Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, Werke, VIII). It must be replaced by a philosophy that grants to the sensible and the corporeal the place that the spiritualistic tradition of the West had denied it, and that directs man’s activity and will toward himself and toward the state, which is the general essence of man (Letters, ed. W. Bolin, I, Leipzig 1904, p. 411). Even the anthropology of Marx (q.v.), while preserving certain motifs of idealism, is in its entirety and in its guiding ideas entirely naturalistic: the decisive forces of history and of culture, including the spiritual, are of an economic and social character (q.V. dialectical materialism; historical materialism).
The transition from idealism to a doctrine that is distinctly anti-metaphysical and naturalistic occurred again later in America when J. Dewey (b. 1859) founded the school of realistic pragmatism or "instrumentalism," which declares spiritual functions to be derivable from biological tendencies and social conditions. Dewey’s school exerted a profound influence on North American thought.
A new type of naturalism emerged in the first decades of this century in England, as an attempt to develop a new evolutionary cosmology (C. Lloyd Morgan, *Emergent Evolution*, 1923; S. Alexander, *Space, Time and Deity*, 1920; A. N. Whitehead, *Process and Reality*, 1929). The characteristic idea of these thinkers consists in affirming a universal law of creative development (*emergent evolution*), according to which the hierarchy of beings and forms of activity in the universe was formed. This law is understood in different ways—either as an expression of an impulse emanating from cosmic reality itself, or as the effect of a metameric principle. Both Morgan and Whitehead seek to approach theism; in reality, however, they do not surpass naturalism, since they define and conceive God merely as a means of explaining the universe.
Finally, it should be noted that the sciences themselves contributed to strengthening naturalistic tendencies. The discovery of the principle of energy, which was also found to operate in vital processes, seemed to demonstrate the equality and mutual transformability of the dynamic factors in all processes—physical, organic, or psychic. The schools and currents of psychology that arose after Wundt (q.v.) have often proposed purely psychological explanations and theories regarding the nature and origin of morality and religion. The most influential current today is that of psychoanalysis and related schools, such as individual psychology. Freud himself proposes a theory (cf. especially *Totem and Taboo*, 3rd ed., 1922, and *The Future of an Illusion*, 1927) that approaches biological naturalism.
From this brief historical exposition, the insurmountable aporias of naturalism become evident. Cosmological-metaphysical naturalism attempts to unify two questions: a) the foundation and essential structure of cosmic being; b) the first being, unconditioned and self-sufficient. The first question leads to a principle immanent in the cosmos, whose degree of being is necessarily itself of a cosmic order and thus cannot satisfy the demands of the idea of an absolutely perfect being. The various naturalistic systems attempt to reduce the distance between these two lines of thought, either by limiting the concept of being (materialism, positivism) or by elevating natural being (panpsychism, panvitalism, reality as a creative principle). Yet such attempts, apart from their intrinsic metaphysical difficulties, are also inadequate for explaining human spiritual reality. For while naturalistic theories may sometimes explain certain substrata and components of the subjective acts and experiences of moral and religious life, their claim to propose theories of morality or religion is acceptable only if one renounces the objective obligatoriness of moral norms and the objective value of religious ideas: naturalistic consideration reduces them to data and facts in which the meaning of the "ought" and of unconditioned spiritual value is lost. The sphere of moral phenomena does not arise from subjective experiences but from the vision of characteristic contents that have no antecedents in personal life and therefore cannot be derived from II.
As for the doctrines of Feuerbach and Marx, it suffices to observe that they ultimately turn against the original intentions from which they arose; the program of giving full value to the concrete reality of man and of directing human effort toward itself has resulted in a profoundly inhuman organization of life.
For naturalism from a theological standpoint, see: **SOPRANNATURALE, ORDINE**.
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