I have been concertedly reflecting on the word nature in one way or another since 2015 or so. I read so much Collingwood, read so much about the distinction between nature and history (now nature and nurture for us), that the problem of nature should inevitably arise.
I was recently wasting time on the internet and came across this guy who calls himself a Tarzan Coach. We have been ignoring our animal side, he says. We should knuckle walk and climb trees, he claims.
I think this is not without value, but it seems misleading to me.
The other day I made this claim to a friend: "If we want to understand what it means to be natural, as a human being, then we need to rediscover the real power of speech."
This claim is predicated on the following presuppositions (in an unclear order):
1. The concept of nature can be applied to both living and non-living things
2. Naturalness with regards to living things is fundamentally about the capacities of a particular body. What is natural for a fish is not natural for a horse.
3. All living bodies are chiefly defined by their ongoing processes. The caterpillar-becoming-butterfly must be understood as one process, despite the fact that it takes on radically different forms. The nature of that process, however, looks quite different: the caterpillar body has different natural capacities than the butterfly body. But this is, of course, also true of human bodies: the child body can do things that the mature body cannot, and same for the body of an elder (not an elderly person, but an elder, a wise older person, their body, too, is such that it is capable of things that the young body is not. Things, hopefully, like wisdom).
4. All living bodies proceed via interaction with their environment. I am currently interacting with my chair by sitting on it, my keyboard by pushing buttons, and my tea by consuming it.
5. For an animal to be natural is for it to find a way of interacting with its environment that further develops or carries forward its capacity. If you dropped an orangutan into the middle of the ocean, for example, it would certainly find ways to interact with that environment (probably mostly thrashing). But it would be absurd to say that the middle of the ocean is the proper way to carry forward or develop a body of that sort.
6. The human body is like other animal bodies in that its naturalness is equivalent to its flourishing in interaction with an environment that is conducive with its development.
7. Living bodies range in their complexity so that being natural may look quite complex or quite simple. A protozoa or a plant doesn't have especially complicated potentialities. Therefore its naturalness is a simpler matter than ours.
8. Life proceeds via layering or pyramiding, so that what was needed at previous stages of bodily development is essentially still needed.
9. We are one of the most complexly layered creatures that we have observed, and our nature seems particularly difficult to understand. What is the right environment for the human being to interact with so that it will flourish? This is a deeply complicated question because we are the making animal who is capable of changing their environments more radically than the other animals (because the other animals of course build dams, nests, and all sorts of things).
10. It is a mistake to identify naturalness with any component of a living process (such as neurology or physiology) or to claim that only the 'primitive' or early layers of development are natural. This is hard for us, our ability to modify the environment is so intense that we can posit ourselves as standing outside this order. But we do not need to claim that there is anything unnatural about culture, language, or symbols. Culture as a concept, of course, often stands in relation to the notion of nature, but this is a problem with our language, not reality.
11. The human capacity for speech, making, and political organization must be seen as just as natural as a fishes capacity for swimming or a gazelle's ability to leap. There is no need to deny naturalness to these capacities of our bodies.
So, then, I raise the question, why would I have to go back to 'monkey' in order to be natural? If naturalness is about an animal body actualizing its potentials in a conducive environment, then why would we think we need to actualize just those primitive layers we can share with others?
To make the point, would we say that a fish is less natural than the single celled organisms that it evolved out of? If a human being needs to 'return to monkey' to be natural, then why doesn't the monkey need to return to its evolutionary precursor?
The natural cannot be identified with the developmentally or temporally primitive.
The human capacity for speech is in dire straits. We have been relegated to the lower layers of our nature by modern society: our nutritive/plant body, our behavioral body, and our symbolically augmented behavioral body. The deep, real capacity for speech, in which it changes things, moves situitions in real, concrete ways, this power has been hidden from us by the bureaucratic and industrial nature of modern society. Indeed, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition recently made this painfully clear to me: Modern society is fundamentally behavioral, and we have lost the capacity for speech. (I recently wrote a blog post for my employer that covers this exact topic. My views, of course, are my own).
To rediscover the naturalness of being human is to discover the power of speech. For only in the experience of speech, the deep and mysterious possibilities of speech, can we understand what it means to be fully human. In the power of speech we experience ourselves as both the animal with language and the political animal.
This does not mean I regard modernity or industrial society as natural or good or okay. But it does mean that, somehow, this situation has been created by a body exercising its natural capacities in interaction with its environment.
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