PaJoFo Ponderings

Modernity versus Nature

9 min read

The word nature is the contested territory in the battlegrounds between eras and moods of philosophers. Each era has fought to lay its claim on the meaning of this word, but, in modernity at least, no claim has stood long uncontested, nor won out. This paper will trace the history of ‘nature’ and attempt to explain the problems of each era’s definition and how those tensions and contradictions were (allegedly) solved.1

Pre-Modernity: The Medieval Realm of Nature

The pre-modern medieval conception, broadly taken from the Aristotelian/Scholastic view, saw the world as consisting of a hierarchy of two realms2, nature and grace. The realm of grace was all that related to man’s relation to God and related institutions — the salvation of the soul, the church and ecclesial authority/bureaucracy; the realm of nature was every activity and institution that was not directly related to that mission — politics, commerce, animals, plants.3 This hierarchy placed the realm of grace above nature as the church was the way for a person to access God and salvation; consequently, the realm of grace, politics, commerce, and non-religious art included, was subjugated.4

The Renaissance: The Medieval Realm of Nature’s Dominance

In Northern Italy, the tension created by the exaltation of some human activities at the expense of others finally boiled over with the Renaissance. Nature took center stage, and more specifically, nature was viewed as a work of art, a great work, created by God, which, when examined, was the path to coming to a greater knowledge of its creator. Thus, harmony with nature was the immediate goal and purpose of man, rather than obedience to ecclesial institutions for receipt of future heavenly reward. In essence, the medieval hierarchy of nature and grace had been reversed, with nature made superior over ecclesial institutions. The classical (pagan) thinkers returned to the fore of authority from where they had been subjugated to theology (the former queen of the sciences) and thus nature, which had been the “stepping stone to grace” was made the imminent voice of God. This division is perhaps most epitomized by Machiavelli’s book, The Prince, which examines politics as a purely natural institution, without reference to scripture or church canons.5

Unfortunately for the thinkers of this period, living in harmony with nature is more difficult in the face of the great outdoors. Lions do not lie with lambs, and they similarly fail to refrain from the consumption of people. If man was to live in harmony with nature, he would need to, through as yet undiscovered methods, subdue it to his will.6

The Enlightenment: Nature as a Machine

The hostility of the Renaissance’ great work of nature to man generated severe tensions within its philosophy. The blade that would be used to cut that tension, though agonizingly double-edged, was forged by Newton in his categorization of physics in mathematical formulas.7 While Newton did not use this technique to its full potential, the weapon was formed and available for subsequent thinkers who took it up as “the most potent instrument yet found for bringing the world into subjection to man.”8

A new view of nature developed: nature as machine — exactly calculable, predictable, and determined according to physical laws which could be discovered and refined through experimentation. Specifically, Bacon’s scientific method and pursuit of a regnum hominis was extrapolated into the mathematical interpolation of nature. Nature was no longer a mystical realm of experience, it was a finite and fully comprehensible system which could have any question about it answered, including “how can I change nature in [x] way?” Problematically, the question “how can I change human behavior in [x] way?” was equally valid, and the attempt to put nature in subjection under man became the subjugation of man himself.

The Bridge Problem

Descartes, in his attempt to free action from the laws of a mechanical world, articulated a dualism between mind and matter (res cogitans and res extensa), contending that only matter is subject to physical laws and that the mind is free to think, free of physical and deterministic laws. The question then became: how can mind, which is totally unimpeded by nature or its laws, interact with the body, which is subject to nature and physical laws? Further, how can the mind be confident that its perception and model of the world is accurate and not fabricated?

Descartes answer: God has it covered.

Why?

Because that’s how it must be.

Other philosophers would attempt to answer this question without recourse to divinity, but their processes would necessarily still make ultimate dogmatic appeals in their religious thrashing at the tension between autonomous and machine man.

Locke’s Solution: Suspension

Locke, would come to the conclusion that man is both bound by mechanical laws of nature and simultaneously capable of acting outside of those laws by suspending them. Nature, for Locke, is deterministic law, and freedom is its antithesis, the absence of determination. Man continues to have a free mind, but unlike Descartes, he is generally subject to deterministic laws (he eats because his body is hungry; he sleeps because his body is tired), and only in the exercise of freedom, engages in choice.9

This theory, while on the surface resolving Descartes problem of the bridge makes a quantitative reduction to a qualitative problem. The dogmatic assertion of reason and the power of suspension remains.

Kant’s Solution: Construction

It is in Kant that a new view of nature appears — nature as constructed by the mind. Kant describes the outside world of nature as a wash of sense-perceptions which the mind forms into the appearance of an outside reality. These perceptions, formed the same way by all minds, are phenomena while thought-processes and artifacts that are outside of the domain of sense-perceptions are numina.10 The regularity of phenomena allow science to continue to operate as before, but the mind is described as a law unto itself (which like thought, is fluid) and thus science, which examines regularities to identify laws is incapable of identifying regularity because the law of the mind is the mind itself. Nature, for Kant, then is that which generates regular sense-perceptions. Unfortunately for Kant, most thinkers found a world that is impossible to interact with certainty with to be uncompelling; his theory failed to provide the confidence so desired by the humanist project.

The End of Enlightenment: Irrationalism

The presumption of reason as a method for understanding the mind and nature faced, in the face of literal revolution by the French, intellectual rebellion against the theories that had promised so much and given nothing but blood.

The Romantics Beautiful Arena

In something of a return to the period between Renaissance and development of the scientific method, the Romantic thinkers, instead of contending against the conflict within the natural world, embraced it. Instead of seeing reason and mechanics as the fundament of nature, the Romantics centered passion and emotion, rejecting science as inadequate rather than incorrect — I think therefore I am was replaced by I feel! Similar movements of irrationalism would go on to posit different fundaments, but all would reject reason.

Hegel Rethinks Nature

Hegel would go on to develop his own theory in The Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing that the outside world, nature, is thought thinking itself. Thus, the distinction between nature and non-nature, mind and matter, is ultimately an illusion; all is geist.

What Can This Tell Us About Modernity

The consistent through-line of these is that, in modern thought, nature is a distinct category which man attempts to exist alongside in harmony. Renaissance thinkers posited a nature that would be harmonious without intervention, enlightenment thinkers posited nature as something to be understood and subdued, romantics as a thing already in harmony which must be enjoyed even in its occasional discordance, and Hegel complicated the thesis, with his elimination of the distinction, but still his project aims to resolve the distinction.

Bibliography

“Creating Id like to Buy the World a Coke.” Accessed March 3, 2026. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/creating-id-like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke.

Footnotes

  1. The hint that those attempts were largely unsuccessful can be seen by the constant attempts at redefinition, but the fuller demonstrations will come later in the paper. ↩

  2. The realm of nature was broken up further into a hierarchy of polis, rational, animal, nutritive, and material forms, but each subsequent level subsumed as form those layers below them. ↩

  3. Interestingly, marriage fell into either realm depending on whether it came within the confines of the church or outside of them. Marriage inside the church was a sacrament, but marriage outside, while still considered valid, was differentiated. ↩

  4. The tendency of some evangelicals to concentrate on overseas missions at the expense of other projects could be argued to parallel this line of thought (though the comparison may also be inapt and further thought is required this would be in line with the reformation’s broader failure to develop a uniquely Christian philosophy). ↩

  5. Whether The Prince is descriptive of politics or prescriptive for rulers is irrelevant to this — the lack of reference to scripture or church teaching demonstrates his belief that politics can be understood as a natural institution which is learned about through observation, not revelation. ↩

  6. In one of the strange synchronicities of history, the Coke commercial, I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke, which was then adapted to become I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony), was filmed in Italy.
    ”Creating Id like to Buy the World a Coke,” accessed March 3, 2026, https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/creating-id-like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke. ↩

  7. The subsequent discoveries that Newton’s physics fail at sufficiently precise measurements and the formulation of quantum dynamics are refinements on mathematization. The importance of the idea is not the formulas, but that there are formulas themselves. ↩

  8. Quote attributed to a Professor Randall in my notes ↩

  9. Freedom, in Locke’s conception, is located in potential not actualization, which is how man can be free while simultaneously failing to exercise that freedom during the bulk of his life. ↩

  10. Given my lack of reading of Kant, I am unsure how he squares this position with the existence of variation of sense-perceptions — colorblindness, poor depth perception, hallucination, and subjectivity of heat/brightness all seem like a problem for this theory of universal reason. Presumably this is resolved by difference of sense perceptions coming from varied sensory organs (though recognizing variation of sensory organs seems as though it would be impossible to be certain of). ↩

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