The Concept of 'Nature'

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(c) Ian Alexander 1996-2002

Nature

I have not managed to track down the paper in which Mary Hesse defined the meanings of 'Nature', but there are also many in Collingwood's historical analysis.

Here, then, are the principal ways that Collingwood says that philosophers over the last three millennia have defined 'Nature', but in his words not theirs. I have given page numbers (to the Oxford Paperbacks edition of 'The Idea of Nature') only where the page is not immediately obvious from the book's table of contents.

'Nature', according to R.G.Collingwood (Philosophers' names in brackets)
 
1. Natural things [are all] made of a single 'substance' (which was water, according to Thales). (The school of Miletus, i.e. the Ionian philosophers)
2. Nature [is] an organism: in fact an animal. (Thales)
3. [Nature is made of] the Boundless. <απειρον> 'apeiron' (Anaximander; i.e. undifferentiated substance, not water or anything else specifically.)
4. [Nature, <κοσμοs> 'kosmos' is] the sum total or aggregate of living things (Gorgias, page 43)
5. [Nature, <φυσιs> 'physis' is] something internal which makes its possessor behave as it does. (This is the primary ancient (Ionian) and modern usage, thinks Collingwood p43, p45, as in "it's in his nature to do that")
6. The nature of things is ... geometrical structure or form. (Pythagoras, mathematical idealism)
7. The things which go to make up the natural world ... are liable to change: a proof of their unreality. (Plato)
8. [Nature, <φυσιs> 'physis' is] (Aristotle)
   • origin or birth (Collingwood thought this completely missed the mark)
   • the seed from which all things grow
   • the source of movement or change in natural objects
   • the primitive matter out of which things are made
   • the essence or form of natural things (a circular definition!)
   • essence or form in general;
   • the essence of things which have a source of movement in themselves (Aristotle's preferred meaning; <φυσιs> 'physis' as opposed to <τεχνη> 'techne', p81)
   • process, growth, change. A world of self-moving things. (p82)
   • a tendency to change in certain definite ways ... until it reaches ... the goal. (p83)
9. [Nature is] something divine and self-creative. (Renaissance thought, p94)
10. The truth of nature consists in mathematical facts. What is real and intelligible in nature is that which is measurable and quantitative. (Galileo, materialism)
11. Matter (or nature) was one thing, and mind another. (Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, Locke; dualism, i.e. nature is everything except mind, thought.)
12. Nature as a whole is the work of the mind. (Bishop Berkeley, "idealism" or mentalism)
13. Nature [is] a product of the human way of looking at things. (Kant, subjective idealism. What was a thing in itself, the ding an sich? Kant said 'we do not know'.)
14. Nature is real, and exists independently of any mind whatsoever. [It is] a reality spread out ... over space and time. The dynamic world of forms, the Idea, is the source or creator of nature and ... through nature of mind. (Hegel; i.e. nature is different both from Plato's forms and from mind.)
15. Nature is not only organism: it is also process. (Whitehead; i.e. believing that evolution is not by chance as Darwin argued, but towards a goal.)

It is striking that instead of offering a definition of nature (beyond his rather dismissve treatment of items 4 and 5 above), Collingwood felt that to understand the term you have to understand the whole history of western thought.