With the modern era came a change in our relationship to the natural world, one that has come under increasing scrutiny. Today it has become essential to unpack as we face a series of ecological crises, exacerbating pandemic diseases, and untenable ways of living. Yet across the globe living in accordance with the patterns of greater nature or cosmos has been exhorted as a maxim to reduce excess, live simply, and return to the present mindfully, positioning oneself within a greater whole. It has even been treated as the most important task in holding back the most destructive forces of civilization. Today, this perennial approach to living has continued to reappear across culture, from the environmental movement to self-help therapies. And yet the idea and meaning of “nature” is itself vague and ever more hotly contested. Is nature merely the domain of the physical and natural sciences? Has one science a superior insight into nature? Alternatively, is study of the ultimate status of nature the domain of philosophy? Is it an ecological perspective? In everyday usage, what is its meaning? Is it merely a colloquial description of what is determined, or “fated” in life?
This edited collection in two volumes will offer critical philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary and historic accounts of living in accordance with the broad natural world as at the center of a good and wise life. It will also explore the meaning and idea of nature in these different perspectives as it relates to and is distinguished from cultural life. This collection will build on the work of Pierre Hadot and cognate researchers on the connections that philosophers, mystics, scholars, and others (ancient and modern) have seen between nature (as articulated in physics, metaphysics, ontologies, ecologies, biologies, and evolutionary theories) and forms of self-communal cultivation, including contemplative spiritual exercises like the “view from above” and the meditation on the transience of things. Hadot’s study The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (2006) highlights the presence within Western heritage of a contemplative, Orphic comportment towards nature, or appreciating nature and our place within it, as irreducible, beautiful, powerful, and majestic. This attitude challenges the “Promethean” paradigm that has ever since modernity, gained hegemony, which tries to harness and control the natural world. Yet, despite the 2006 translation of The Veil of Isis, the link Hadot saw between views of nature and philosophy as a way of life (pwl) remains largely unexamined, together with its implications for contemporary debates surrounding the urgent need for humanity to reconsider its relations with the nonhuman world. In addition, whether modern humanity
Further, criticisms have emerged of the naturalistic fallacy in such practices. Others have defended the view that culture, not nature, is where to place our life affirming commitments to the greater whole. Alternatively, others have criticized the anthropocentrism of such accounts. Given such a critical discussion there is a need to bring these threads together in new, timely, and interdisciplinary volumes.
This collection seeks to build off three related and developing literatures. While The Veil of Isis has been noted within pwl scholarship, it has not yet been fully incorporated as a major framework for pwl considerations, nor has the more general theme of living according to nature itself. And although Hadot himself developed this notion throughout his career,1 this will be the first volume to give key focus to the relationship between pwl and living according to nature. Most current engagements have been stand-alone essays (e.g., Andreas and Ferraro 2022; Ferraro Forthcoming), whose authors are now involved in developing their ideas in this work.
The second body of existing literature this field builds upon is on Bruno Latour and his actor-network theory (ant). Latour and ant offer a model for overcoming reductive approaches to the nature/culture dualism, via networks of actors and actants that are only recognized in context, and whose role shifts depending on the perspective and situation.2 Latour seeks to find a modality for ecologically sensitive politics that transforms the way we see and engage in our environments (see Latour 2004; 2017).
The third body of literature this volume builds upon are the cognate research of Donna Haraway (2016) and others to address the crises precipitated by the Anthropocene age. These projects call for a new kind of engagement with our environments, one that recognizes what is within our impact, what is beyond our impact, and what is beyond our very ability to reflect upon. It seeks again for us to “stay with the trouble,” finding wonder in the world that is more than humane reflection on nature, ever beyond us.3
- a.
Both historically and today there is an ongoing engagement with nature as more than a merely unified conceptualization of our scientific study of reality. Nature in this sense provides a way to take a more expansive view of our biological, cosmological, and metaphysical situation and what that means for who we are, what we may do, and what we hope. - b.These engagements treat nature and culture not as dualistic, independent realms, but rather as two poles or perspectives on reality, which creatures such as us (whether articulated as distinctively human, or just one kind of animal life or activity) create as a space in which to imaginatively reconstructive our environments (the movement of nature and culture). Culture becomes the medium in which we engage with nature as study or spiritual exercise.
- c.Such engagements seek to overcome old and reductive attempts to reduce nature to a narrow set of roles, norms, or perspectives, instead of an open-ended process rooted in our deepest mythic stories and structures, which we can draw ever new resources from to our benefit. This may mean overcoming the binaries of nature/culture, animal/humane, actors/objects, norms/practice, to develop a more dynamic picture, and context aware meta-account of the ways in which engagement with nature as a transformative practice.
These thematic insights are grounded in a collection of essays that are meant to be a foundational resource for scholars, students, and pwl practitioners from a variety of disciplines and walks of life, seeking to better understand and engage with historic and contemporary approaches to if and how we ought to live in light of the broader conditions of our environment. In order to best serve such a wide audience, we have offered a variety of kinds of essays, from technical pieces of Hadot or Aquinas scholarship, to playful “reflection” pieces meant to introduce and incite readers to engage with these thematics. “Reflection” essays will be demarcated in separate introductory subparts of the main parts of the collection. For university libraries it will bring together key pwl and interdisciplinary scholars working on a topic of immense interest given the climatic and environmental crises we face today. For this reason, the potential readership is wide. In addition, the essays in this volume have abiding stand-alone value, e.g., pieces that advance revolutionary ideas for understanding the development of the pwl field.4 In an underdeveloped domain for research, it will be a foundational reference work, hopefully the first of many.
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Volume 1 provides a grounding for understanding how we narrate, find insight from, and build perspectives on living in accordance with nature, hence its title: Myths, Insights and Perspectives.
Part 1 begins with the short introduction reflection by Piotr Osóbka, that draws on the work of Hadot: “The Story of Isis: How Did the Egyptian Goddess Become Unveiled?” In it we see how these mythic modes of sense making, through narratives of “Isis unveiled,” have shaped the attitude of Western philosophy and science for millennia, exploring the roots of the human relationship and orientation to nature. Arkadiusz Kubiak then digs in further with his chapter “Man in Nature/Nature in Man: The Experience of Life in Ancient Greece from the Mythological Perspective of Karl Kerényi.” This chapter draws on the work of one of the founders of modern research on Greek mythology, Karl Kerényi, to tease out how those in Greek antiquity made sense of their relationship to the world/nature, and what that teaches us about our own situation. Building on foundational scholarship studying humanity’s primordial mythic relationship with nature, in “On the Constellation of Myths: The Literary and Philosophical Project of Human Nature, Based on the Works of Roberto Calasso,” Adriana Wierzba focuses on the way absence in our stories, in ourselves, and in nature shapes us mythically: in this sense “loss precedes presence.” She draws on the work of Roberto Calasso, who paved the way for the study of the relationship between myth and modern consciousness. In the following essay, we turn to yet another pivotal figure in the study of myth; in fact, this scholar/writer is arguably the most important influence on public perception and popular cultural engagement with our perennial mythic approach to telling the story of nature and our natures: Joseph Campbell. Krzysztof Głod’s “Planetary Myth – The Necessity and Example of Contemporary Cultural Utopia in Joseph Campbell,” explores how myth provides us ways to navigate our own nature, and that of the world, and whether modern humanity needs a new global myth to renew a healthier and meaningful engagement with reality. Part 1 is concluded by a dynamic interdisciplinary essay that is grounded in psychological anthropology, and uses psycho-cultural analysis as a vehicle to give a naturalist assessment of how early Slavs conceived of human nature and its development: “Psychological Anthropology of the Early Slavs: A Naturalistic Slavic Conception of Human Development,” by Andrzej Pankalla, Konrad Kośnik, and Jacek Stasiorczyk. This piece provides a vital social-scientific study
Part 2 considers a different modality in which we seek to engage with nature and live according to it: Does engagement with nature, or our nature, provide us insight into how to respond to our thrownness, our given condition? Alternatively, does a natural mode of living provide us with unique insight into who we are, how we should live, and what we may hope? The part is entitled: “Insights from Nature/Natural Insights.” Leon Miodoński begins this part with an erudite piece of scholarship in Romanticism and Idealism. In “Man and Nature in the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich,” he provides an illustrative example of how a Romantic-idealistic painter sought to express the modalities of mediation within us and nature, to find within us the very expression of that nature, in its depths and greatness. He also explores the legacy of Friedrich on later generations of painters. In “Body: My Place between Nature and Myself,” Paweł Korobczak follows this historical trajectory, by considering corporality’s reference to the lifeworld, as distinguished from culture, and how corporality itself “remains nature,” as the essence of the human and ethicality, through the lens of existentialism and phenomenology: particularly that of Heidegger, as well as Husserl, Landgrebe, and Merleau-Ponty. We end this story – beginning in Idealism and moving through phenomenology and existentialism – with the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Eli Kramer and Randall Auxier provide a slow food ethic and aesthetics in accordance with Whitehead’s broadest sense of nature and the cosmos. This is why they playfully deem, as their title suggests, that this is: “Eating according to Nature: Justifying Robbery.”
Part 3, the final part, considers Hadot’s aforementioned Promethean and Orphic attitudes toward nature, and whether one, both, a mix, or something beyond them, is needed given our current eco-political crises. The part begins with Barbara Rogala’s essay “Contemplative Science: An Orphic Way of Living according to Nature for Facing the Environmental and Climate Crisis.” In it she proposes an attitude of scientific contemplation as a more balanced alternative than Promethean technological triumphalism or Orphic primitivism. Urszula Lisowska follows and develops this line of thought in her essay “Between and Beyond the Promethean and the Orphic: On the Nature–Politics Relationship in the Anthropocene.” She suggests that a politics for the Anthropocene age should include both attitudes and work between them. It also needs to move beyond them by recognizing nature as something that cannot be fully grasped or controlled by our reconstructions, conceptualization, reflections, and
Bibliography
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Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2021. “The Other Species Capability & the Power of Wonder.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 22, no. 3: 154–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2020.1869191.
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Ferraro, Gianfranco. Forthcoming. “Philosophical Mythoi: The Birth of Spirituality from the Nature of Things.” In Hadot and Foucault on Ancient Philosophy: Critical Assessments. Edited by Hélder Telo and Marta Faustino, 88–113. Leiden: Brill.
Hadot, Pierre. 2006. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hadot, Pierre. 2023. Don’t forget to live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises. Translated by Michal Chase. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime . Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Lind, Andreas and Gianfranco Ferraro. 2022. “The Hospitality between Humanity and Nature: from Ecology to a Sympoiethic Form-of-life.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 78, no. 4: 1219–1232.
Schinkel, Anders. 2021. Wonder and Education. On the Educational Importance of Contemplative Wonder. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
See Sharpe’s essay in this collection and Hadot 2023.
See Kwiatkowska’s essay in this collection.
For more on wonder, education, and nature, see Anders 2021.
See D’Agostino’s, Sharpe’s, and Stettler’s essays in this collection.