Naturalism

NATURALISM. - The term takes on different meanings in the classification of philosophical systems, moral doctrines and religions. The precise sense, in the various cases, is to be determined according to the underlying concept of 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, will be those conceptions of the world or religions that regard nature as a completely self-sufficient reality, endowed with a formative and creative power; such are the various forms of pantheism, materialism, hylozoism, panpsychism. b) "Nature" can be understood as the totality of material things, whose behavior and action is determined according to invariable and fixed laws, in opposition to the self-determination of the free spirit. In this sense, naturalistic are those 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 a simple necessity of fact, 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, n. indicates a systematically empirical or positivistic approach or, in the practical sphere, a conception that recognizes only ends of an immediately practical and utilitarian significance. d) "Nature," finally, can be understood as that which corresponds to the order of the world, to the essence and powers of things: natural facts are opposed, in this sense, to what is supernatural or preternatural. Naturalistic, therefore, will be those doctrines that deny the possibility of miracle or the existence of a supernatural order and life, in the sense of Christian theology. With more particular reference, in the philosophy of religion, n. or naturism indicates theories and tendencies that hold religious ideas and sentiments to have arisen from certain deeply impressive experiences before the phenomena of nature. In art, n. means tendencies that reject the idealization of reality in aesthetic representation (v.).

At the dawn of Western thought there appears a form of religion in which motives deriving from the experience of the numinosity of nature play a very important part; this religion was able to develop, without discontinuity, into a religiosity for which the mysteries of the divine coincide with the mysteries of the cosmos. The divinities are considered as immanent in the universe; natural phenomena provoke the experience of their presence. According to Hesiod the gods are descendants of Uranus and Gaia, procreated by the force of Eros, which is likewise a cosmic force. The innovation of the philosophers of nature (φυσικοί) with regard to this mythology consists substantially in this, that they determine 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 n. 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 the ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τελεστή of the universe (cf. H. Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 5th ed., Anaximander, A 15;

Demokritos, B 30; Diogenes Apoll., B 5). The motives that lead beyond this n. came first of all from the religious ideas and experiences of Orphism. They found in the philosophy of Plato their conceptual and speculative elaboration. In Aristotle, God is conceived and introduced in function 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 acting. The n. appears instead with new 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 divinities and the world there can at most be a relative difference, inasmuch as one may distinguish between the principle of the world in the full possession of its formative power and the secondary formations produced by it. On the other hand, however, it must be observed that Stoicism expresses in its cosmology also the consciousness of the superiority of spirit over 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. The n. appears instead almost without attenuations in the school of Epicurus (v.). T. Lucretius Carus (v.) expounded its system in the De rerum natura, 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 motifs deriving from the ancient commentators. These tendencies prove even more resolute and open in the thought of G. Fracastoro, G. Cardano, B. Telesio, Fr. Patrizzi, T. Campanella, G. Bruno. In them the fundamental intention of the Presocratics revives: to understand nature as a reality complete and closed in itself, the 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 insert even human life, with the exclusion of certain acts recognized as spiritual, into the whole of the cosmos. Yet a complete pantheistic naturalism was not attained. Even G. Bruno, who comes closer to it than the others, acknowledges that theology and ethics have as their object a God beyond the world, inaccessible to philosophical thought. Setting aside this reservation, however, he expounds in an almost classical manner the doctrine of the immanence of the first formative power and of 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 is 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 the supreme and divine perfection is understood not as absolute spiritual self-possession but as unlimited fullness and richness of being (ibid., I, props. 9, 11). For Hobbes the concept of being is identified with that of body; every form of activity is mechanical motion or conatus, and psychic processes are motor reactions provoked, in an entirely teleology-free 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 transforms Hobbesian materialism into a psychological naturalism. This system appears in completed 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). The moral problematic is developed by a purely psychological method, starting from the experiences in which good or evil are perceived as affective tonalities 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 of A. Bain (Mental and moral science, ibid. 1868).

Naturalism 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 bending decisively toward materialism. J. Offroy de Lamettrie (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 the organization of the body. Holbach's Système de la nature (with the significant subtitle: Des lois du monde physique et du monde moral), which represents the most systematic exposition of the naturalism of this epoch, defends an atomistic materialism that attributes to every body the properties of extension, spontaneous motive force and sensitivity. The materialistic naturalism of the nineteenth century (L. Büchner, G. Moleschott) is distinguished from the naturalism of the Enlightenment only by its more decisively mechanistic attitude.

The second half of the nineteenth century is characterized by evolutionism, whose foundations Ch. Darwin had laid (On the origin of species by means of natural selection, London 1859; The descent of man, ibid. 1871). With the idea of evolution and with the determination of the factors acting within it, the natural sciences seem to have conquered a breadth of vision such 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 is already Darwin's own. For H. Spencer (System of synthetic philosophy [ibid. 1862-93]) the evolution of organic forms represents merely a special case of a general cosmic law, according to which, in ever new degrees and dimensions, the passage is accomplished from states of an indeterminate and incoherent homogeneity to states of a determinate and organized heterogeneity (First Principles, I, part 2). The phenomena of morality appear in this evolution when human individuals unite to form societies; the moral laws define precisely the conditions of the just equilibrium between the individual tendencies to prosperity and happiness and the integrating and organizing tendencies of social life. Starting from quite different concerns, Fr. Nietzsche too arrived at a conception that granted, among all values, primacy to the values of vital robustness; his critique of the moral systems of the past approaches in many points the evolutionistic naturalism. Among the authors who uphold it even today, mention should be made of J. C. Flugel (Man, morals and society, London 1945) and J. Huxley (The prerequisites of progress, Paris 1947).

But naturalism was asserting itself also outside the materialistic-positiv[istic] 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 decisively naturalistic conceptions. L. Feuerbach (1804-72) objected to Hegel's philosophy that it was by then necessary to concretize and materialize the "Logos" as well, the former 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 truly being; religion, which implies personal relations with a transcendent reality, can be nothing other than 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 (Lettere, ed. W. Bolin, I, Leipzig 1904, p. 411). Even the anthropology of Marx (v.), while preserving certain motifs of idealism, is in its entirety and in its master ideas entirely naturalistic: the decisive forces of history, and of culture including spiritual culture, are of an economic and social character (v. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO).

The transition from idealism to a clearly antimetaphysical and naturalistic doctrine was accomplished 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 has had a profound influence on North American thought. A new type of naturalism arose in the first decades of this century in England, as an attempt to develop a new evolutionistic 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 of forms of activity in the universe has been 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 draw close to theism; in reality, without overcoming naturalism, inasmuch as they define and conceive God merely as a function of the 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 verified in vital processes, seemed to demonstrate the equality and mutual transformability of the dynamic factors of all processes, whether physical, organic or psychic. The schools and currents of psychology that arose after Wundt (v.) have 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 the related schools, for example, of individual psychology. Freud himself proposes a theory (v. especially Totem und Tabu, 3rd ed. 1922 and Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927) that approaches biological naturalism.

From this brief historical exposition it is possible to discern the insuperable aporias of naturalism. Cosmological-metaphysical naturalism attempts to unify the two questions: a) of the ground and essential structure of cosmic being; b) 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, whether by means of a limitation of the concept of being (materialism, positivism), or by an elevation of natural being (panpsychism, panvitalism, reality as creative principle). But such attempts, beyond their intrinsic difficulties of a metaphysical order, are also inadequate for an explanation of human spiritual reality. For if naturalistic theories can sometimes explain certain substructures and components of the acts and subjective experiences of moral and religious life, their claim nonetheless to be able to propose theories of morality or of religion is acceptable only when one renounces the objective obligatoriness of moral norms and the objective value of religious ideas: naturalistic consideration transforms them into data and facts, in which the meaning of "ought to be" and of unconditioned 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 which therefore can likewise not be derived from it.

As regards the doctrines of Feuerbach and Marx, here it suffices to observe that they ultimately turn against the original intentions from which they arose; the program of giving to the concrete reality of man all its value and of bringing man to concentrate his effort upon himself has been accomplished in a profoundly inhuman organization of life.

For naturalism under the theological aspect v. SOPRANNATURALE, ORDINE.

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