“What is nature?” is a question that seems impossible to answer. The challenge to fathom, even in the most general and preliminary sense, what exactly the what of the question refers to—A thing? A process? A logic? A field? A concept? A metaconcept? A trope? A condition? Being itself?—is daunting enough to bring to mind Augustine of Hippo’s answer to the riddle of time: “What is therefore time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I am asked, I would like to explain it, but I can not. “Nature” is one of the most important concepts in the intellectual history of the Western world. And yet, if we were to look at its semantic palimpsest in one glimpse, we would discover it crammed with contradictions. When we talk about “nature,” we conjure up something that is at the same time concrete and abstract, material and conceptual, physical and metaphysical. To the modern person, “nature” can evoke breathtaking landscapes, the thick of a rainforest, or awe-inspiring natural phenomena. And yet it stands for those landscapes—particular, material, and tangible—also as a whole, as a totality abstracted from their concrete appearance. “Nature” encompasses the objects that populate those landscapes as well as the invisible forces that move them. “Nature” designates the essence of things, the immutable quid that makes things what they are, and contains connotations of eternity, changelessness, and ahistoricity. And yet it changes: nature evolves, unremittingly producing and extinguishing populations, species, and ecosystems.
The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
by Federico Marcon
“What is nature?” is a question that seems impossible to answer. The challenge to fathom, even in the most general and preliminary sense, what exactly the what of the question refers to—A thing? A process? A logic? A field? A concept? A metaconcept? A trope? A condition? Being itself?—is daunting enough to bring to mind Augustine of Hippo’s answer to the riddle of time: “What is therefore time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I am asked, I would like to explain it, but I can not. “Nature” is one of the most important concepts in the intellectual history of the Western world. And yet, if we were to look at its semantic palimpsest in one glimpse, we would discover it crammed with contradictions. When we talk about “nature,” we conjure up something that is at the same time concrete and abstract, material and conceptual, physical and metaphysical. To the modern person, “nature” can evoke breathtaking landscapes, the thick of a rainforest, or awe-inspiring natural phenomena. And yet it stands for those landscapes—particular, material, and tangible—also as a whole, as a totality abstracted from their concrete appearance. “Nature” encompasses the objects that populate those landscapes as well as the invisible forces that move them. “Nature” designates the essence of things, the immutable quid that makes things what they are, and contains connotations of eternity, changelessness, and ahistoricity. And yet it changes: nature evolves, unremittingly producing and extinguishing populations, species, and ecosystems. It is at the same time alien and familiar, a perfect example of that which Sigmund Freud called “das Unheimliche”—“the uncanny.” “Nature” loves to hide its secrets—as in Heraclitus’s famous aphorism—but it is also a perfectly intelligible “book,” “written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.” Nature is the mysterious goddess Isis, Spinoza’s God, and benign Mother, but it is also “red in tooth and claw.” It is a harmonious, autopoietic, and self-healing organism and a field of conflicting and destructive forces. It is both within and without us. It is particular: it defines what kind of human beings we are as individuals, with our peculiar attitudes, vices, and virtues, but it is also universal, defining what it means to be a human being, endowed with inalienable rights. Human beings, for some philosophical traditions, are an integral part of nature, while other thinkers, from Aristotle to Heidegger, via, needless to say, René Decscartes have struggled to demonstrate our substantial distinction and separateness from it. …
(sk)
東洋には、西洋の nature に対応する言葉はなかった。
「常陸国風土記」などというものを取り上げ、無理に古代日本における自然観などということを論じれば、変なことになるのは当たり前のこと。
なかったものを、あることには、できない。
「The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan」などという題に惹かれ、こんな文章を読み、時間を無駄にした気もするが、それでも、日本には明治時代に至るまで「自然」という概念がなかったということについて考えることができ、良かったような気もする。
たかが私の時間。無駄もなにもあったものではない。