Returning to the subject of nature, that selfsame Mother Nature, deservedly or undeservedly (I still need to make up my mind on this!) dissed by Schopenhauer, when he called Man grandchild of God, bypassing his mother in the order of rank (perhaps, Schopenhauer had something against mothers, in his psychological subconscious? [an inside joke for Schopenhauer students]), I cannot resist the temptation of directing myself to the brave philosophical challenge, contained in the already much-quoted opening sentence of Hobbes’s Introduction to Leviathan, where Nature has no indication of being a daughter of God (as a result of Creation), but rather God’s skill in making the world. I am immediately pointing out Hobbes’s conceptual inconsistency in not explaining to us his abandonment of a general understanding that nature and the world are seen as synonyms within the context of Creation, but this is exactly such wonderful inconsistency which constitutes the intellectual challenges thrown at us by all great philosophers, Hobbes prominently included. So, here again is that opening sentence of Leviathan, which the reader must have long learned by heart, in the process of reading my copious pages:
“Nature (the art whereby God has made and governs the world) is by the art of man imitated, so that it can make an artificial animal.” This interesting analogy, becoming the philosophical basis of Leviathan, shows an intriguing subtleness of definition here. “Nature” is not equated to the world, but, rather, to the creative force of God, his “art.” In this context, the “forces of nature” come to mean the physical processes utilized by God’s spiritual powers, and thus, God appears to be in full direct control of his Creation, where “direct” is the key word. Being a matter of definition, Hobbes is completely within his rights, representing his idea of nature in this fashion, but the philosophical implications are vastly significant. It should be great fun to examine the consistency of his philosophy as a whole with this challenging premise, but I cannot spare any time for such an effort, besides, the entire range of his philosophy is somewhat limited in its scope, unlike in Kant’s case, for instance, and may not even provide us with sufficient evidence to make such a judgment.
As a postscript to Hobbes’s understanding of Nature, I will do what I should have done long before (and I will definitely correct this retrospective oversight in my future revisions), that is, pointing out that Hobbes is not original in treating Nature as God’s Art. More than three centuries before him, Dante wrote, in his 1320 work De Monarchia, “Nature is the art of God Eternal.” Whether Hobbes was familiar with Dante’s idea or not, is beside the point, but setting this record straight provides an important illumination.
A different, but philosophically not inimical, nature of Nature presents itself to us in Spinoza’s Ethica.
Ethica starts off with the distinction of substance, attributes, and modes. Substance is something that can be conceived as existing in complete independence. It cannot be explained by anything else, it becomes its own cause, and it is necessarily in existence. Because of the way it is defined, substance becomes identified with God, but also with nature as a whole, hence the slide toward “pantheism.”
Substance possesses an infinite number of attributes, defined by Spinoza as “what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” Of these attributes, only thought and extension can be known to the human mind. “All things are alive,” Spinoza insists, which is a natural deduction from his basic premises.
Substance is diversified into an infinity of finite modes, human beings and all other discreet objects being of this nature. Modes are parts of the whole, and cannot be separated from it, thus, the human mind is part of God’s mind. (If that is so, Hobbes’s likening of God’s art to Man’s art, and calling this nature, doesn’t seem too far-fetched...)
In this shocking exposition, I see “pantheism” as a trap word, which allows the know-it-all skeptic to nod, with a self-indulgent smile, as he is quick to understand what the normal implications are when a concept is identified with its denotate. However, considering God in the traditional sense of an Unknowable Being, as we should, there are also His Sefirot, ranging, in terms of their proximity to the human mind, from the also-unknowable, to the knowable, and with this in mind, Spinoza’s God, as Substance, may be identified with a knowable manifestation of the unknowable God. By the same token, Nature may not be necessarily identified with God in-toto, but only with this great proviso of Moses Cordovero, who lived a full century before Spinoza, and can be summoned here to put the latter’s “pantheism” in proper perspective: “God is Everything, but Everything isn’t God.” (The brilliance of Cordovero’s formula becomes apparent when we put it in the more familiar form of algebra and Aristotelian logic: a=b, but b is not equal to a!)
Substituting “Nature” for “Everything,” we can now arrive at this far more palatable “pseudo-pantheistic” formula: “God is Nature, but Nature isn’t God.” (How does that fit into the Hobbesian context? God’s art, being an attribute of God, and God being knowable only through His attributes, neatly fits into the formula “God is art, but art isn’t God.”)
To wind up Spinoza’s view of Nature, however, we may cite another passage in his Ethica, where Spinoza clearly distinguishes Nature from God on teleological grounds:
“Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.” (Ethica, I). It is impossible for me to imagine Spinoza, who was an ardent theist, ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, denying God His Purpose in Creation, and, therefore, so much for Spinoza’s alleged “pantheism”!
In discussing the nature of Nature we have deliberately avoided the meaning of “nature” as the essence of things (as in this Aristotelian passage, for instance: “It is in the nature of the stone to move downward…”). The purpose of this omission should be clear from the title of this entry: talking about the nature of Nature, we are focusing (please, do figure this out, as this is not a mistype!) on Nature, and not on Nature’s nature.
“Nature (the art whereby God has made and governs the world) is by the art of man imitated, so that it can make an artificial animal.” This interesting analogy, becoming the philosophical basis of Leviathan, shows an intriguing subtleness of definition here. “Nature” is not equated to the world, but, rather, to the creative force of God, his “art.” In this context, the “forces of nature” come to mean the physical processes utilized by God’s spiritual powers, and thus, God appears to be in full direct control of his Creation, where “direct” is the key word. Being a matter of definition, Hobbes is completely within his rights, representing his idea of nature in this fashion, but the philosophical implications are vastly significant. It should be great fun to examine the consistency of his philosophy as a whole with this challenging premise, but I cannot spare any time for such an effort, besides, the entire range of his philosophy is somewhat limited in its scope, unlike in Kant’s case, for instance, and may not even provide us with sufficient evidence to make such a judgment.
As a postscript to Hobbes’s understanding of Nature, I will do what I should have done long before (and I will definitely correct this retrospective oversight in my future revisions), that is, pointing out that Hobbes is not original in treating Nature as God’s Art. More than three centuries before him, Dante wrote, in his 1320 work De Monarchia, “Nature is the art of God Eternal.” Whether Hobbes was familiar with Dante’s idea or not, is beside the point, but setting this record straight provides an important illumination.
A different, but philosophically not inimical, nature of Nature presents itself to us in Spinoza’s Ethica.
Ethica starts off with the distinction of substance, attributes, and modes. Substance is something that can be conceived as existing in complete independence. It cannot be explained by anything else, it becomes its own cause, and it is necessarily in existence. Because of the way it is defined, substance becomes identified with God, but also with nature as a whole, hence the slide toward “pantheism.”
Substance possesses an infinite number of attributes, defined by Spinoza as “what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” Of these attributes, only thought and extension can be known to the human mind. “All things are alive,” Spinoza insists, which is a natural deduction from his basic premises.
Substance is diversified into an infinity of finite modes, human beings and all other discreet objects being of this nature. Modes are parts of the whole, and cannot be separated from it, thus, the human mind is part of God’s mind. (If that is so, Hobbes’s likening of God’s art to Man’s art, and calling this nature, doesn’t seem too far-fetched...)
In this shocking exposition, I see “pantheism” as a trap word, which allows the know-it-all skeptic to nod, with a self-indulgent smile, as he is quick to understand what the normal implications are when a concept is identified with its denotate. However, considering God in the traditional sense of an Unknowable Being, as we should, there are also His Sefirot, ranging, in terms of their proximity to the human mind, from the also-unknowable, to the knowable, and with this in mind, Spinoza’s God, as Substance, may be identified with a knowable manifestation of the unknowable God. By the same token, Nature may not be necessarily identified with God in-toto, but only with this great proviso of Moses Cordovero, who lived a full century before Spinoza, and can be summoned here to put the latter’s “pantheism” in proper perspective: “God is Everything, but Everything isn’t God.” (The brilliance of Cordovero’s formula becomes apparent when we put it in the more familiar form of algebra and Aristotelian logic: a=b, but b is not equal to a!)
Substituting “Nature” for “Everything,” we can now arrive at this far more palatable “pseudo-pantheistic” formula: “God is Nature, but Nature isn’t God.” (How does that fit into the Hobbesian context? God’s art, being an attribute of God, and God being knowable only through His attributes, neatly fits into the formula “God is art, but art isn’t God.”)
To wind up Spinoza’s view of Nature, however, we may cite another passage in his Ethica, where Spinoza clearly distinguishes Nature from God on teleological grounds:
“Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.” (Ethica, I). It is impossible for me to imagine Spinoza, who was an ardent theist, ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, denying God His Purpose in Creation, and, therefore, so much for Spinoza’s alleged “pantheism”!
In discussing the nature of Nature we have deliberately avoided the meaning of “nature” as the essence of things (as in this Aristotelian passage, for instance: “It is in the nature of the stone to move downward…”). The purpose of this omission should be clear from the title of this entry: talking about the nature of Nature, we are focusing (please, do figure this out, as this is not a mistype!) on Nature, and not on Nature’s nature.
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