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 2 provides a deeper exploration of the relationship between nature and culture and our role within it, hence the title: Nature and Culture.
Part 1 is on “The Relations of Nature and Culture.” The volume begins with a formidable and extensive essay on Thomas Aquinas’ account of nature at three different levels of explanation (physical-cosmological, metaphysical, anthropological-ethical-cultural), and what it means for Christian humane development and culture in accordance with the ends implied therein: “The Principle of Motion, Substantial Constitution, and Source of the Good Life: Thomas Aquinas’ Doctrine of Nature at the crossroads of Physics, Metaphysics, and Anthropology,” by Michele Sciotti. Given both Aquinas’ prominent role in the Western tradition of the philosophy of nature, and the technical subject matter of the contribution itself, this essay is longer than many in the volume. The next essay, “On the Relation Between Humans and Animals in the Context of Medieval Animal Trials” by Wociech Kilan, shows the Thomistic architectonic in application. Here, Kilan traces the history of these juridical proceedings and the assumptions they had about the metaphysical/theological/juridical relationship between the natural as animal life and the cultural/religious as human life. He then interprets these trials through a Thomistic lens.
We rapidly move forward through the history of Western thought, to look at a tradition that has quite a critical perspective on the Christian account of nature: psychoanalysis. In “The Terms ‘Nature’ and ‘Natural’ in Psychoanalytic Conceptions: Freud and Jung,” Ilona Błocian provides a full account of the layers and dimensions of the uses of these terms by these psychoanalytical juggernauts. Such terms illuminate how our primary and primal psychic forces contend with the limitations and necessities of cultural life. Kamila Morawska further explores a perspective deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, but yet truly novel and unique, in “Poetic Life in Harmony with the Elements of Nature: Gaston Bachelard’s Tetralogy.” Bachelard’s elemental poetics and psychology of poetics, through the modalities of fire, water, wind, and air, provides an illustrative “archeology of imagination,” showing how certain poet/writers inhabit natural, elemental complexes. The part ends with an essay about our contemporary situation, and a context that is perhaps the primary site for sorting out our symbiotic or toxic relationships to nature and culture: the city. Adam Chmielewski’s “Resilience and Fragility of the City: A Case for the Philosophy of Urbanism” is a critical call to action on engaging in this new
Part 2 puts to question the nature/culture divide, with the idea that culture needs somehow to align itself with the laws or rules of nature being particularly contested. This part draws heavily on the work of Latour and is entitled: “Moving beyond the Nature/Culture Divide.” It begins with the introductory reflection by Berenika Dyczek: “In Search of Harmony Between Nature and Culture: The Metaphysical Landscape of Bruno Latour’s Thought.” Here, Dyczek engages in Latour’s project to go beyond this divide to enact a sustainable and thriving “political ecology” that no longer devastates our planet, but rather promotes the flourishing of actors and actants in their different contexts. Ewa Kwiatkowska further develops Latour’s alternative, from a sociological perspective in “The Riddle of ‘Living According to Nature’ in the Light of the Sociology of Translation: Three Actors Instead of Two.” She demonstrates how he provides not only a metaphysic, but also a sociological method that is sensitive to dynamic contexts, and does not readily separate nature and culture into hard and fixed categories. No longer are we trapped with eternal substances of nature and culture, with humans who must sort out ultimate reductive relationships between them. Karol Morawski concludes this Latourian section, by showing the alternative to natural and normative politics and law that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe build drawing from, in response to, and in distinction from, Latour. They provide a compositionalism that rejects an objective “view from nowhere,” and seeks to deepen our understanding of the context and emergence of our collective activities.
Part 3 concludes the volume, as well as the collection. It considers an engagement with nature in continuity with culture as a kind of spiritual exercise, that is a practice of self-communal cultivation, drawing on the biography, perspective, and insights of Hadot. For this reason, it is named “Nature-Culture as a Spiritual Exercise.” The part starts with Simone D’Agostino’s essay “Pierre Hadot, Reader of Montaigne: The Essays as Spiritual Exercises,” which provides new biographical context for Hadot’s interest in “philosophy as a preparation to die,” and to transform our engagement with the world via spiritual exercises. It shows how in Montaigne, Hadot finds a method to discipline (via spiritual exercise) our distracted cultural mind. This helps us find simplicity, clarity of vision, ourselves (our natures), and our relations to Nature, a discipline of culture in which we seek equanimity in our natural condition. This is epistrophic, “guiding [of our] thoughts to the present and directing the mind back to natural order.” In addition to this the epistrophic return to self, Matteo Stettler adds a Hadotian account of metanoic transformation in our perception of nature,
Bibliography
Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2017. “The Reasonableness of Wonder.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 18, no. 3: 337–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2017.1342385.
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.
Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2022. “Beneficial Relations between Species & the Moral Responsibility of Wondering.” Environmental Politics 31, no. 2: 320–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1868818.
Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2023. Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder. How the Mind’s Original Joy Is Revolutionary. London, New York and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic.
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. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge: Polity 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.