![]() ![]() ![]() Nature is the fuel of potentiality which in being actualized is erupting into flame. Nature is the motive impulse that drives every act, including acts of interpretation by which we evaluate our own and others' acts. Nothing in nature is accidental, fortuitous or gratuitous all things express and serve some kind of need or immediate imperative, and even though the domain of natural needs has been vastly complicated by human language and culture, the principle of nature has not been refuted but only extenuated by such developments. Know thyself in such a culture does not signify an objective, distanced kind of cognitive act, but a subtle and laborious intimate familiarity: gnothi seauton expresses a gnosis or intuitive apprehension, not a noiesis or formal-intellectual grasp of a "problem." All creatures in nature breed true to their kind: so too human words and actions are the signature of the mind that fathered them. Nietzsche grasped the utterly connoisseurial ad hominem implicit in this ancient culture, a mode which sophisticated modernity shames its denizens into overlooking - ".that most difficult and captious kind of backward om the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the want that prompts it." The entire aristocratic hierarchy of ancient society hinged on the subtlest and surest judgment of quality of motive and purpose, on the very psychological speciation of character-types which in antiquity each had their own natural sphere - private household, marketplace, public forum. Even when we foolishly suppose they are serving only our own abstracted purposes, in actuality we are discharging our own natural potential by them. Our very consciousness and thinking are organs for the order of nature. All human liability for tragedy and folly grows out of that seed of potential divorce and self-exceptionalism just as wisdom, freedom, goodness, and truth grow out of a healthy congruence. Consciousness serves the interests its organism has been endowed with, but it has a notorious egocentric tendency - its own relatively dysfunctional nature - to set itself in opposition to the comprehensive world of nature. Even every word-choice, every nuance in stylistics, expresses the organism of needs and biases which is human personality: as Blake wrote, As a man is, so he sees. The Greek system of nature is that regime of instinctive purposes, of naturally ingrained needs and ends, called teleology. #NIHILEGO CARDSMITH HOW TO#All that is said and done, even among purportedly rational humans, serves a natural telos or purpose to every act or phenomenon there is an immanental or self-implicit "why." We know how to read the order of nature when we grasp the full diversity of such natural reasons. The laws of nature apply more obliquely or ingeniously in such a case. That a creature acts "naturally" - intelligible to anyone with the requisite concepts - is axiomatic that it may act apparently unnaturally or contranaturally is baffling, an anomaly that defies the orderly cosmos of nature. Nature is the latent, inward, even cryptic sufficient reason for any creature's being as it is and acting as it does. That Logos, that logic or mode of order, reigns even over the minds and wills of human beings. Comprehended according to its own intrinsic mode of rationale - how it forms and organizes itself and tends to behave and should be understood - nature makes the specific and coherent kind of sense that the Greeks call physis. It is a system of manifest or intuitively accessible laws, although human beings by reason of their own occlusive natures can make themselves obtuse and inept to grasp its orderliness - even as they nonetheless obey it. ![]() It is a far richer principle than anything moderns understand by mechanistic biology or psychology. "Nature" is the peculiar logic of dynamic, organic existence, authorized to take care of itself by executing its own self-interpreted instincts. Nature as Becoming and as Intrinsic TruthĪncient Hellenic culture is the regime of the principle of nature. ![]()
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