Nature and freedom.

• Author: Wolcher, Louis E.
• Position: Reflections

It's strange how the words we use to describe a thing can radically change our attitude toward it. The label "previously owned" makes a used car seem, well, less used, and the "life insurance" you buy today will pay, after all, only when you are dead. Our predeterminations of what is worth thinking about and how to think about it make a world that is always peculiarly limited in scope, just as a spotlight illuminates what it is pointed at while leaving everything else in darkness. In short, how we think, what we care about, and how we behave are all powerfully affected by our categories for organizing experience.

The same principle governs our use of the word nature. A question such as "What is the relation between nature and freedom?" is ambiguous in an interesting way. Such a question must be thought down to its roots before we can make a promising attempt to answer it. Most of the time we tend to leap over what is simple and original, only to get hung up on the complicated and derivative. And so it is with nature and freedom: we jump without pausing into seemingly intractable political controversies such as environmentalism versus free-market capitalism, of preserving nature versus satisfying the needs of universal human development. These problems are admittedly pressing and difficult, but they cannot be understood properly, let alone solved, if the question that grounds them remains unasked. Prior to any question about the relationship between necessity and contingency, nature and freedom, lies a more fundamental question that is hardly ever asked: What is nature? Fortunately, a nearly forgotten tradition gives us a useful means for considering this question. In pre-Socratic Greek thought, long before there was nature there was physis. This Greek word is the root of our words physics and physical. Roman thinkers, following Aristotle, later translated physis into natura, the antecedent of our words nature and natal. Aristotle described physis as merely one branch of being among many others on a "many-branched tree" of beings, a way of putting it that began to express the conceptual separation of man from nature. As Heidegger puts it, Aristotle's version of physis is but an "echo" and "late derivative" of physis as the Greeks originally understood it (1998, 229).

The translation of physis into natura has been decisive ever since. The image of natality (Mother Nature giving birth to the world's many beings) supplanted an image of self-generation and self-renewal. Lost in this translation was an entire way of thinking about nature. In the beginning, physis was never a realm of natural, as opposed to man-made, objects interacting with one another in determinate processes occupying space and time. Rather, physis was originally conceived as the self-generation of all that is. The Greeks construed the being of beings as constant presence. For example, this page is because it is present before you. But the Greeks knew that this way of putting it is insufficient, for it ignores the phenomenon of time. Some acknowledgment must be given to the page's temporal persistence in being present. Physis is that acknowledgment: it refers to the "presencing" of what-is-merely-present. After Aristotle, this way of thinking was lost to Western thought until Spinoza rediscovered an echo of physis in the form of his stipulation that each thing, insofar as it is at all, always "endeavors to persevere in its being" (1949, 135).

One can witness the philosophical counterpart of this original Greek idea of physis emerging in the earliest fragment of Greek philosophy that has come down to us: in around 560 B.C., Anaximander (1996, 72-73) posited a "first principle" from which all beings emerge and to which they all return, of necessity. This principle is presencing as such, and it is not the same as the mere beings that physis propels forward, in the form of time (Heidegger 1975, 55). A century after Anaximander, the preSocratic philosopher Heraclitus similarly described the cosmos as that which presences in a manner that is logically prior to both men and the gods: he characterized it as "ah everliving fire, being kindled in measures and being put out in measures" (1987, 25).

As the metaphor or an eternal fire suggests, physis was originally conceived as the self-generation of all that is: the ongoing and continuing presencing of beings. Although natura was destined to become a theological concept in the Middle Ages, in the formula "God created nature," physis transcends theology: the early Greeks thought that the gods themselves, just like everything else in the world, were...