NATURISM. - It is a general orientation of the human spirit characterized by the constant concern to follow nature, positively excluding, or merely ignoring, any consideration of all that is transcendent. N. is a mentality, a forma mentis that pervades every field of man's cognitive or practical activity: one may therefore have an n. in art (verism), in religious and philosophical thought (naturalism), in economics (physiocracy), in the juridical conception (natural law), in ethical life (moral naturalism) and even in ascetic life (Pelagianism, Americanism).
At present, the name n. tends to designate properly a social movement with a medical-hygienic background, in reaction to the artificiality of an overly mechanical and urbanized society, reserving the name of naturalism for other cultural and practical movements.
The contemporary naturist current aspires to realize a simpler standard of living, basing itself on the results of modern biology. Linking itself to the Hippocratic doctrine of "nature as healer" and to the synthetic mentality established by the physician of Cos in the treatment of disease, naturist physicians fight against overly refined foods, in favor of a rather vegetarian system, against anti-hygienic fashion, in favor of healthy clothing, non-deforming and not in excessive quantity: they tend not so much to cure diseases as to prevent their onset, removing, with simple treatments and suitable diets, the dystonias of the organism that would generate morbid conditions. The most representative names of this current are the Rev. Sebastian Kneipp, Birker-Brenner, Dr. Paul Carton. Recently (1931) the Italian Naturist Union (U.N.I.) was also founded in Milan, with its own journal: L'idea naturista (since 1931).
It must be borne in mind that the ideal of the naturists is not animal life according to the dictates of pure instinct, but the harmonious development of the human person both in body and in spirit, precisely according to the completeness of man's nature. This is in direct opposition to nudism, which, given its affinities with n., strives to be confused with it in order to endorse, with the soundness of certain naturist views, a tendency foreign to true human nature: the animalizing tendency.
NUDISM
Nudism, in fact, represents a short-sighted and one-sided vision of naturism, and against it the naturist physicians rise up, among whom in the first place the head of French naturism, P. Carton. Nudism is a system of doctrines and practices having as their end the diffusion of nudity as the most suitable means for improving humanity physically and morally. It claims to have also a theoretical framework, and in fact it is the manifestation of a mentality formed in the school of Rousseau, positivistic and materialistic, Nietzschean and Freudian, which draws the ultimate consequences, converging in its results with the postulates of the erotic fever of present-day society. Certainly nudist phenomena have many times appeared in history: from the Adamites of the early times of the Christian era to the Turlupins of the 14th century, down to the experiments of Villars (1925); but what is symptomatic is the great diffusion that occurred from 1930 first in Germany (where there was a period of revival also after World War II), then in France, then in the Anglo-Saxon countries with the formation of groups destined for nudist propaganda and practice, such as, for example, the Berlin groups Pelagianer-Bund, Lichtfreude, and those of the Seine of the Durville brothers.
The cornerstones of the nudist-naturist conception are constituted by the materialistic vision of man, to whom no norm should impede the fulfillment of instinctive tendencies, so that even in the sexual sphere modesty would be an unreasonable taboo of remote and superstitious epochs. It is added also that nudity is immoral because of the morbid curiosity of the two sexes, a curiosity that is stimulated by clothing and that would be removed by abolishing it. The usefulness of nudity is confirmed by the organism's need to benefit from heliotherapy. The contradictory nature of nudist moralism is evident, since it is precisely clothing that has the purpose of dulling impressions which, if violent, would lead to the infraction of the moral law. It is easily demonstrated that modesty has instead a primary biological-social and individual function, and that if heliotherapy brings undeniable advantages to the organism, it is not necessary for it, nor even advisable, to be totally without covering.
It must be held that nudism represents an aberration derived from a false conception of life and a symptom of the lowering of civilization. The psychologist Howard C. Warren concludes a report of his on nudism with a doubt that nudism is a form of "visual ribaldry": certainly the tendency to nudity constitutes an effect and, from a different point of view, a cause of the aphrodisia of modern society.
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Costante Scarpellini