Nature and Natural Law, Classically Understood
Nature, in classical philosophy, had a meaning similar to essence or spirit, in that it referred to the innate potentials of things that made them what they are. Thus, it was possible to speak of human nature, what it was to have a humanity, and what the essence of being human was. At the same time, there was a nature to everything, such that there could be understood to be a Whole of nature, which was the compendium of these natures.
As time went on, this classical conception of nature was largely forsaken in favor of a more mechanically-reductive consideration of nature. To be clear, mechanics had always been a consideration of natural philosophy. What was new was not the mechanics itself, but the reductionism, which tended more and more to reduce the natures of things to the effects that can be had from them rather than from their own causes.
You see, Aristotle, who had become the staple of classical philosophy as looked back upon from the Middle Ages, had taught that there were four causes, or reasons that things happen. These included efficient causation, which was the causation of mechanics, such as when one exerts force onto an object, and which would become the major focus of mechanical conceptions of nature, as well as final causation, or purposefulness and goal-directed behavior, which had been an important consideration well into the Middle Ages and corresponded to the inner natures of living things. Along with these were material causation, or the stuff that composes a thing, and formal causation, or the shapes that the stuff can be made to take on. Thus, for Aristotle, a table’s material cause is its wood and its formal cause is its platform structure, but its efficient cause was the mechanical effort of the craftsman, and its final cause the craftsman’s goal. [1] It is important to note that the final cause here is imposed upon the table through the craftsman’s goal and his use of efficient causation, but that this is because of the lifeless nature of the table. The craftsman himself, suggests Aristotle, as a living being, is distinctly self-determined, unlike the table, and his efficient causation springs from his own muscle and his final causation from his own vision, which sort of emanates from a telos, or finality. To do good was to do things in accordance with the final cause, and to do right was to use efficient causation proficiently to achieve that which is good.
Nature and Natural Law, Scholastically Understood
Come the time of the Middle Ages, the Scholastics had been reintroduced to Aristotle, especially by way of the Islamic Golden Age, which had preserved Ancient Greek works past the fall of the Roman Empire. Whereas Aristotle’s work was largely a statement about the innate natures of things and the need for them to be free in order to satisfy those natures, it did contain some authoritarian moments, [2] and the Scholastics took this to the extreme, using Aristotle to justify rigid religious and political hierarchies and social control that he would not himself had advocated for.
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You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:
- Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
- Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
- Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature
... as well as other topics related to natural philosophy, natural theology, science, and history, including but not limited to:
- Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
- Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
- Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism
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