NATURALISM. – The term assumes different meanings in the classification of philosophical systems, moral doctrines, and religions. Its precise sense in each case is to be determined according nature (v.). One may distinguish: a) “Nature” as the first principle and origin of all things and phenomena. Nature, understood in this sense, is opposed to the idea of a transcendent and supramundane being. Naturalistic, therefore, are conceptions of the world or religions that regard nature as a completely self-sufficient reality, 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 conduct and activity are determined according to invariable and fixed laws, in opposition to the self-determination of the free spirit. In this sense, anthropological and moral conceptions are naturalistic when they subordinate man, even in his personal acts, to causal laws of the type of physical laws. Corresponding to such conceptions are theories of truth, goodness, and religion that eliminate ideal and objective normativity and attempt to reduce it to a 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 metaphenomenal or immaterial realities. According to this opposition, naturalism indicates a systematically empirical or positivistic orientation or, in the practical sphere, a conception that recognizes only ends of immediately practical and utilitarian significance. d) Finally, “nature” 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, are opposed to that which is supernatural or preternatural. Naturalistic, therefore, are doctrines that deny the possibility of miracles or the existence of a supernatural order and life, in the sense of Christian theology. More particularly, in the philosophy of religion, naturalism or naturism indicates theories and orientations that hold religious ideas and sentiments to have arisen from certain deeply impressive experiences in the face of natural phenomena. In art, naturalism means orientations that reject the representation (v.).
At the dawn of Western thought, there appears a form of religion in which motives arising from the experience of the numinosity of nature play a very important part; this religion was able to develop, without interruption, into a religiosity in which the mysteries of the divine coincide with the mysteries of the cosmos. The deities are regarded as immanent in the universe; natural phenomena provoke the experience of their presence. According to Hesiod, the gods are descendants of Uranus and Gaia, begotten by the power of Eros, which is likewise a cosmic power. The innovation introduced by the philosophers of nature (φυσικοί) with regard to this mythology consists essentially in their determining the mysterious foundation of nature by means of 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. Divine attributes and perfections are applied to the foundation of nature, and the concept of the divine has no further meaning than that of designating ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τηλεστή of the universe (cf. H. Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 5th ed., Anaximander, A 15;
Demokritos, B 30; Diogenes Apoll., B 5). The motives that led beyond this naturalism arose above all from the religious ideas and experiences of Orphism. They found their conceptual and speculative elaboration in the philosophy of Plato. In Aristotle, God is conceived and introduced as part of a metaphysical explanation of cosmic processes; his essence and life, however, are determined (Met., XII, 7-9) according to norms and conceptions of perfection that are not inspired by cosmological and naturalistic considerations, but express an absolute and general ideal of being and action. Naturalism appears instead with renewed vigor in Stoic philosophy. The ultimate principle of things is identical with the universe (cf. Cicero, De natura deorum, II, 45-47; Plinius, Hist. nat., II, 25). Between the deities and the world there can be at most a relative difference, insofar as one may distinguish between the principle of the world in full possession of its formative power and the secondary formations produced by II. On the other hand, it must be observed that Stoicism also expresses in its cosmology an awareness of the superiority of spirit in relation to empirical nature. The principle of the world is determined as λόγος and νόος; the universe is not the work of chance, but of a reasonable providence. Naturalism appears instead almost without Epicurus (v.). T. Carus (v.) expounded its system in De rerum natura, thereby influentially transmitting the naturalistic ideas of antiquity to humanism and the Renaissance.
Naturalistic tendencies in fact found new expression in the neo-Aristotelian schools of the sixteenth century (P. Pomponazzi, S. Porta, G. Zabarella, C. Cremonini, L. Vanini). The interpretation given to Aristotle is in part inspired by naturalistic motives deriving from the ancient commentators. These tendencies are shown to be still more decisive and explicit in the thought of G. Fracastoro, G. Cardano, B. Telesio, Fr. Patrizzi, T. Campanella, and G. Bruno. In them there comes to life again the fundamental intention of the pre-Socratics: to understand nature as a reality complete and closed in itself, an adequate cause of individual beings, of their various forms, and of their order. Cosmic processes are understood according to biological and psychological analogies. The image of the world thus becomes hylozoistic or panpsychistic, which makes it possible to include human life as well, with the exception of certain acts recognized as spiritual, within the whole of the cosmos. A complete pantheistic n. was not, however, reached. Even G. Bruno, who comes closest to it, recognizes that theology and ethics have as their object a supramundane God, inaccessible to philosophical thought. Apart from this reservation, however, he sets forth in an almost classical manner the doctrine of the immanence of the first formative power and the first mover in the universe, and of its substantial identity with matter (Della causa, principio ed uno, dialogues II, IV, and V). Naturalistic pantheism was elaborated in its most rigorous and consistent form in the system of B. Spinoza, in which extension and spatiality are attributes and modes of the divine substance (Ethica, I, prop. 15, scholion), and supreme and divine perfection is understood not as absolute spiritual self-possession, but as unlimited fullness and richness of being (ibid., I, propp. 9, 11). For Hobbes, the concept of being is identified with that of body; every form of activity is movement or mechanical conatus, and psychic processes are motor reactions provoked, in an entirely atelological manner, by external physical stimuli. Hobbes (The questions concerning liberty, necessity and chance, London 1656) treats anthropological problems, with full awareness of the consequences, according to the new scientific concept of nature as a rigid deterministic system. English empiricism attenuated this extremist position by developing a sensationalist psychology that transformed Hobbesian materialism into a psychological n. This system appears in complete form in the work of Hume (Enquiry concerning the principles of morals, London 1751; The natural history of religion [in Four dissertations, I], ibid. 1757). Moral problems are developed by a purely psychological method, beginning with experiences in which good or evil are perceived as affective tones of certain representations. This doctrine also underlies the theories of A. Smith (Theory of moral sentiments, ibid. 1759)
and continues in the eighteenth century in the philosophy of J. St. Mill (A system of logic, VI, ibid. 1843) and A. Bain (Mental and moral science, ibid. 1868).
N. assumed its clearest expressions in the age of the Enlightenment, with particular manifestations in the social, pedagogical, and religious fields (F. De Maupertuis, Voltaire, Ch. de Montesquieu, J. J. Rousseau), subsequently turning decisively toward materialism. J. Offroy de Lamettrie (Histoire naturelle de l'âme, The Hague 1745; L'homme machine, Leiden 1748) formulated the postulate of understanding all psychic functions on the basis of the organization of the body. Holbach’s Système de la nature—whose subtitle is significant: Der lois du monde physique et du monde moral—which represents the most systematic exposition of the n. of this period, defends an atomistic materialism that attributes to every body the properties of extension, spontaneous motive force, and sensitivity. The materialistic n. of the nineteenth century (L. Büchner, G. Moleschott) differs from the n. of the Enlightenment only in its more decisively mechanistic attitude.
The second half of the nineteenth century was 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 acting within it, the natural sciences seemed to have attained such breadth of vision as to justify their claim to be able to determine definitively the essence and meaning of all reality. The attempt to derive moral phenomena from biological facts and laws already belongs to Darwin himself. For H. Spencer (System of synthetic philosophy [ibid. 1862-93]), the evolution of organic forms represents only a special case of a general cosmic law, according to which, in ever-new degrees and dimensions, the passage occurs from states of an indeterminate and undifferentiated homogeneity to states of determined and organized heterogeneity (First Principles, I, part 2ᵃ). The phenomena of morality appear in this evolution when human individuals unite to form societies; moral laws precisely define the conditions of the proper equilibrium between individual tendencies toward prosperity and happiness and the integrating and organizing tendencies of social life. Proceeding from very different concerns, Fr. Nietzsche likewise arrived at a conception that granted primacy, among all values, to the values of vital vigor; his critique of the moral systems of the past approaches evolutionary n. at many points. Among the authors who still support it today, J. C. Flugel (Man, morals and society, London 1945) and J. Huxley (The prerequisites of progress, Paris 1947) should be recalled.
But n. was also asserting itself outside the materialistic-posit. currents. Particular mention should be made of 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 « Junghegelianer », toward decidedly naturalistic conceptions. L. Feuerbach (1804-72) objected to Hegel’s philosophy that it was now necessary also to concretize and materialize the « Logos », which forms 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 true mode of being; religion, which implies personal relations with a transcendent reality, can be nothing other than an illusion produced by wrongly interpreted desires (Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, Werke, VIII). It must be replaced by a philosophy that grants the sensible and corporeal the place that the spiritualist tradition of the West had denied them, and that directs human activity and will toward the human being himself and toward the state that is « l'essenza generale » of man (Lettere, ed. W. Bolin, I, Leipzig 1904, p. 411). The anthropology of Marx (v.) too, although preserving certain motives of idealism, is as a whole and in its central ideas entirely naturalistic: the decisive forces of history and of culture, including spiritual culture, are economic
and social in character (v. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO).
The transition from idealism to a distinctly anti-metaphysical and naturalistic doctrine took place later once again 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 n. arose in England during the first decades of this century, 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, 1920). The characteristic idea of these thinkers consists in the affirmation of 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 the expression of an impulse proceeding from cosmic reality itself, or as the effect of a metempirical principle. Morgan and Whitehead seek to approach theism; in reality, without going beyond n., insofar as they define and conceive God as a mere explanation of 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 of all physical, organic, or psychic processes. The schools and currents WUNDT, WILHELM (v.) often proposed purely psychological explanations and theories concerning the nature and origin of morality and religion. The most important current today is that of psychoanalysis and related schools, for example, individual psychology. Freud himself proposes a theory (v. especially Totem und Tabu, 3rd ed. 1922 and Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927) that approaches biological n.
From the brief historical exposition, the insuperable aporiae of n. may be discerned. Cosmological-metaphysical n. attempts to unify two questions: a) that of the foundation and essential structure of cosmic being; b) that of the first, unconditioned, self-sufficient being. The first question leads to a principle immanent in the cosmos, whose degree of being is necessarily itself of a cosmic order and therefore cannot satisfy the demands of the idea of an absolutely perfect being. The various naturalistic systems attempt to reduce the distance between the 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). But such attempts, besides their intrinsic metaphysical difficulties, are also inadequate to an explanation of human spiritual reality. For although naturalistic theories can sometimes explain certain substructures and components of the subjective acts and experiences of moral and religious life, their claim to be able to propose theories of morality or religion is acceptable only when one renounces the objective obligatoriness of moral norms and the objective value of religious ideas: the naturalistic consideration transforms them into data and facts, in which the meaning of “what ought to be” and of unconditional spiritual value is lost. The sphere of moral phenomena is actualized not through subjective experiences, but through the vision of characteristic contents, which have no anticipations in premoral life and therefore cannot be derived from it either.
As regards the doctrines of Feuerbach and Marx, it is sufficient here to observe that they ultimately turn against the original intentions from which they arose; the program of granting the concrete reality of man its full value and of leading man to concentrate his effort upon himself was fulfilled in a profoundly inhuman organization of life.
For n. under its theological aspect v.: SOPRANNATURALE, ORDINE.