Nature as Philosophy

The old discourses are returning, but every repetition is as the philosophy of Jacques Derrida has shown us at the same time a variant if not a variation, which cannot recover what was varied. The countless publications on the subject of nature from the 1970s and 1980s that are likely completely unknown to the environmentally active youth of today are returning to the forefront. Books that deal with philosophy, society, ethics, aesthetics and cultural history in the context of questions about nature and that determined the social discourse of this time are returning. Although nature had never entirely disappeared in the past decades, its presence remained unmistakably in the background.

Nature as Philosophy is a strange title for an essay, dazzling and ambiguous: as if nature and philosophy melt together seamlessly, as if the point was for nature not only to become a challenge for it but also to become philosophy itself. The connotations are manifold: place of nature in philosophy, possibility of a philosophy of nature, nature of philosophy in the genitivus subjectivus as in the genitivus objectivus. The question is asked about the "natural" character of philosophy but also how philosophy thinks or has thought about the character of nature. In terms of the history of thought, the subject of nature as philosophy almost inevitably catapults us back to the turn of the 19th century, to the epoch of romanticism and idealism, among whose representatives there was hardly a poet and thinker who did not deal with the philosophy of nature.

Nature like its apparent counterpart culture is a powerful and grand word, perhaps a word that is overpowering and too grand. “Nature is a word that can be written in the sand, a word to play with and to ruminate over, an invitation to the most diverse associations". What remains confusing is what nature can be: the primal state, the animal and plant world, the seemingly indestructible rock, the organic, the physical, the unconscious, the landscape, the primeval forest but also in a certain and precarious way we ourselves. What concerns us all today is the vulnerability of nature, external as well as internal. It also forms the core and centre of Marielis Seyler's oeuvre. What appears to us injured and threatened are: the inhabitants of a post-industrial world, the living beings around us, certain animal species and the organic world of plants, in summary also the landscapes and natural worlds to which they belong and in which they live. Ultimately the desert, the embodiment of a violated area is also nature, namely an impressive and in its immensity a sublime biotope if only because of the fact that also here there are living beings, green oases and fertile land.

The word nature is usually in binary opposition to another macro-term: culture. Both terms live, as it were, ex negativo in a peculiar symbiosis with one another, as culture initially means nothing other than the cultivation (of nature and soil). The biblical narrative of the paradise from which humans were expelled is not a primeval wilderness but a garden, an image of a successful interaction between nature and culture: peaceful, harmonious and without exploitation, death, injury and extermination of all that exists. God, the demiurge of resident human beings, creates nature as a harmonious garden. The zoo, the park or the world of stuffed animals are seemingly gentle forms of such appropriation of the creaturely. In the stuffed animal, in the animal fable as in the zoo, the power of the real and dangerous predator such as a lion is apparently magically banished once and for all.

How much nature is in culture, how much culture is in nature? The world outside of Paradise is often determined by ruthless opposition. Everything that human beings have created is culture, everything that they have not created is nature including themselves. Perhaps humans have created nature as a comprehensive counterpart to themselves: as a word, a symbol, a concept, a projection screen or as hostile terrain on which they try to display what they have encountered outside but also inside themselves.

Conversely the other, the opposite of human beings, 'nature' in the form of catastrophes, epidemics and the tenacious dynamic of growth potentially seeks to reclaim all that humans have created for themselves in the form of a seemingly secure cultural world. Human beings live under the threat that what the philosopher Hans Blumenberg called the "absolutism of reality" could return. For Georg Simmel, the ruin is that phenomenon in the intermediate area between nature and culture in which the existence of "mere natural forces" manifests itself.

The engineers of the industrial age and the post-industrial epoch, in which nature including human nature primarily only occurs as a resource and as an object, look at nature in a completely different way. Both take place at the same time: a never before seen perfected exploitation and destruction of nature in all its possible forms and meanings and a sentimental attachment to it, the feeling that we need the resonance of multifaceted nature for our mental state and for a successful life. The fact that this nature is no longer "pristine" (which it probably never was) in no way prevents us from our love of domesticated nature: pets, celebrations of cultivated landscapes or from the use of refined "natural" agricultural engineering that lets us feel our nature in the form of body and soul - breath, heartbeat, movement.

The origin of the Latin word nature may provide a clue to its dual form. It is derived from the verb nasci, which means to arise, to be born. This is where a dynamic moment comes into play, to which the German romanticists in particular paid special attention. Nature can be divided into two meanings, an important theme for Marielis Seyler. On the one hand, we encounter it as a world of shapes, as a diversity of "being" (Heidegger). On the other hand, it refers to an invisible force that creates shape and change out of nothing: natura naturata and natura narrans, created and creative nature. It is the creative force of nature, the creatio ex nihilo, which persistently preoccupied and impressed the romanticists of the 19th century and the forerunners of our current discourses. Romanticists such as Novalis, the young Friedrich Schlegel or Schelling, Hegel's companion and competitor, were masters of analogy. In their intellectual endeavours, nature itself because of its generative power becomes an art/culture that creates a diverse world out of itself and quite unconsciously, which is to say out of its own strength just as the artist in his or her work. Not only every human being, but nature as a whole is an artist. The artistic ability of nature and that of art-making humans becomes an analogue and at the same time part of an evolution, which for Schelling culminates in the conscious creation of human works of art in which the dynamics of nature are revealed: nature as philosophy, but above all, nature as art.

Before Darwin, Schelling's systematic philosophy of nature outlined a completely different concept of evolution, which brings dark matter into a dynamic connection with lucid consciousness: from alpha to omega. Nature makes its debut so to speak unconsciously; it is the unconscious per se. It performs a metamorphosis at the end of which the human being stands. In humans, nature as it were becomes conscious of itself. In its consciousness it beholds itself and becomes aware of itself. In this respect, human beings are not in opposition to nature but are its eloquent expression, a developed form of nature. In this holism the opposition between non-human nature and human culture dissolves completely. Remarkably, Schelling's system of transcendental idealism gives priority to art over philosophy. Art is intellectual self-contemplation, but beyond philosophy in its analogy to natura naturans -to creative nature- it also shows the dynamic inner side of that unconscious with which nature coincides in Schelling's work. But this unconscious is at the same time a latent consciousness that shows itself through philosophy and art and thus comes to the fore. Consciousness does not stand at the beginning of the genesis of nature, plants, animals and humans but at the end of an evolution in which nature recognizes itself in the human medium. In this dizzying panentheistic system of thought, in which "God" is in everything and everything is in "God", transcendence and immanence ultimately coincide. If there is something divine, it begins its work completely unconsciously. God does not know what he is doing, he is slumbering when he creates the world by emptying himself like the artistic human once did in order to come to himself. The result of this creation is consequently a work of art. The very narcissistic God of the young Schelling comes into the world late and manifests himself in the abundance of nature. The now seemingly strange definition of physics as a theory of fantasy comes from Schelling's romanticist rival Novalis. In later years, in his summary work On the History of Modern Philosophy Schelling himself rejected this theory of nature, which was so radical for his time, because it was incompatible with Christian monotheism.

What the romanticist inventors of a completely new understanding of nature had in mind was a completely new way of dealing with the familiar binaries. The opposition nature versus culture is the most powerful including pairs of opposites such as: humans and animals, reason and feeling, conscious and the unconscious, man and woman, adult and child. The conflicting instants of the natural are not completely resolved but gently overturned through the thought pattern of analogy, through overlaps or reinterpretations into mutually dependent poles that are not hostile to one another but rather create a productive tension that prevents a static harmony, which distinguished earlier static theories of nature.

Such a mind-set was and is to some extent new even today. It aims to think differently and act differently, namely co-designing. As later with the American romanticists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who inspired Mahatma Gandhi as well as Martin Luther King, the German and English romanticists had a very clear idea that their nature as philosophy contained a cultural alternative world. They were all socialized with Rousseau's philosophical battle formula "back to nature". Against the background of the looming unheard-of changes initially in occidental societies and cultures in the form of industrial production and science and medialization, a spiritual counter-world was already heralded in their natural philosophy. A discomfort in culture emerged that Sigmund Freud critically examined much later. It went hand in hand with the feeling of being in a dodgy, wrongly advised world. The reference to nature as philosophy formed the indispensable horizon for a life that wants to be modest and say goodbye to the project of overcoming nature in a second from now on human creation. Such a philosophy is of course not "natural" but part of a cultural evolution that is demanded by its development at a special and critical point. Of course, modern natural philosophy presupposes this. Because it is only through the distance that humans create in the process of their evolution to themselves and the world around them that nature becomes possible as philosophy, as ethics. Thereby we can take a critical look at our world threatened by environmental damage and climate problems, through overexploitation and the extinction of animal and plant species and demand a reversal, the social consequences of which are of course incalculable.