Nature

The universe, including the planet Earth, was established by means of natural evolution; the process and the result of the Big Bang activity. Usually, nature is understood as something that originated naturally, that is, the opposite to culture or just the opposite to spiritual culture (human mind, activities). The term naturesometimes comprises the whole objective reality, including human society (i.e., even the sō called second nature). As it is used today, the word nature is not only rather inexplicit but also rather inaccurate. Its content doesn't imply that the Earth is connected with the universe; that humans, as a biologic species, are a part of the Earth environment; or that humans are organisms closely connected with the other live systems of the biosphere. It doesn't also reflect the scientific knowledge that only biosphere, as a whole, is the smallest, comparatively autonomous system capable of a long-term progressive development in time. Humans and other organisms living in the biosphere, individuals, populations, and species are temporary and nonindependent, dependent on the structure, integrity, and prosperity of the planetary biotic whole. Therefore, integrity and prosperity of the biotic whole are also critical for the human culture.

Nature is one of the oldest philosophic terms. The Greek word physis was an everyday term designating those things that originated naturally, without the influence of human activity. The Latin word natura was understood similarly. The Middle Ages interpreted both humans and nature as created by God. The theoretical interest in humans and nature was revived in Renaissance thinking, but the term didn't acquire any specific theoretical contents. Indeed, it has been disappearing from theoretical thinking since the end of the 17th century because of the high prestige of Newtonian physics. It seemed that it was finished as a term whose etymological root referred to birth and origination. It was also the influence of Descartes's nature-human dualism that forced the idea that humans, who learn about nature and transform it, don't belong in nature, that they are superior to it. Nature was understood as an expanse, as an indestructible substance and energy, as a substance where nothing new comes into existence ontically. The term naturewas diluted in the ontologically more important term substance.

[Page 1701]Development of the mechanical technology after the Industrial Revolution supported the idea that the character of natural events is best described by physics cooperating with mathematics. Yet even those categories of physics, such as body, force, distance, movement, acceleration, and so on, that were understandable to general thinking, reduced nature into bodies moving in space, into a mechanism without its own history, ontical creativity, and value. The emphasis upon the energy and mass conservation law, expressed by the well-known Einstein equation E = mc2, concealed the fact of the natural evolution of the universe, that is, the irreversibility of time and the temporary character of structures.

Source: © iStockphoto/Evert van Scherpenzeel.

The needs of establishing an adequate anthropology and of dealing with the conflict between culture and nature make us define nature in an evolutionally ontological way, not only as an objectiveness independent from humans but also as a human-including procedure, as a natural evolution embodying the irreversible constitutive time. If there is any deep sense in natural evolution, it is the construction of the grand structure of the universe, the creation of its large-scale physical order, including also the complete terrestrial abiotic and biotic orders.

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