Natural

The term ‘natural’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several fault lines that resist easy synthesis. At one pole stands the Stoic and Aristotelian inheritance, in which ‘natural’ designates that which accords with an entity’s constitutive telos — impulse, motion, and ethical appropriateness all being calibrated against what nature prescribes for a given kind of being. Cicero’s De Natura Deorum extends this into a cosmological register, wherein universal nature is itself an ordering intelligence. Against this rationalist domestication of the natural stands a counter-tradition, represented in Auerbach’s literary-historical analysis, in which ‘natural’ is historically contingent: what one epoch calls natural (civilized decorum under Louis XIV) is what another will call artifice. Jung and von Franz locate the natural in a different domain altogether — the psyche’s own spontaneous productions: dreams, images, archetypal fantasies — which are ‘natural’ precisely in that they arise unbidden from a substrate prior to ego-construction. This psychobiological sense of natural recurs in Hogenson’s treatment of Baldwin-effect evolution and in the Philokalia’s distinction between natural and supernatural knowledge. The tension between nature as rational order, nature as biological substrate, and nature as cultural construction gives the term its persistent productive ambiguity throughout the library.

In the library 14 passages

The concept of the natural was not contrasted with that of civilization; it was not associated with ideas of primitive culture, pure folkdom, or free and open countrysides; instead it was identified with a well-developed and well-educated type of human being

Auerbach demonstrates that ‘natural’ is a historically variable concept whose meaning under Louis XIV denoted rational, cultivated social decorum rather than primitivist spontaneity, directly challenging later Romantic assumptions.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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Central to Aristotle’s thought is a contrast between what is natural and, on the other hand, what is biaion, that which is produced by constraint or force applied from outside.

Williams explicates the Aristotelian structural opposition between the natural as self-originating tendency and the forced as externally imposed constraint, a distinction fundamental to both his physics and his political philosophy.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis

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aii naturam esse censent vim quandam sine ratione cientem motus in corporibus necessarios, aii autem vim participem rationis atque ordinis

Cicero presents the Stoic debate between two definitions of nature — one as a blind mechanical force and one as rational, ordered providence — establishing the cosmological framework within which natural teleology is contested.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45thesis

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Knowledge here on earth is of two kinds: natural and supernatural. Natural knowledge is that which the soul can acquire through the use of its natural faculties and powers when investigating creation and the cause of creation

The Philokalia draws a systematic distinction between natural knowledge — achievable through unaided rational inquiry — and supernatural knowledge given by divine grace, situating the natural as the bounded horizon of unaided human cognition.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis

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natural things stimulate impulse, by which it is meant that in animals the presentation of something which is in accordance with its nature automatically produces an impulse to pursuit behaviour

Inwood articulates the Stoic doctrine that natural objects trigger instinctive impulse in animals, establishing the psychophysical mechanism by which nature is encoded in motivational structure.

Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis

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all that is against nature is painful, what takes place in the natural way is pleasant. So death itself, on this principle, is painful and contrary to nature when it results from disease or wounds, but when it comes to close the natural course of old age, it is, of all deaths, the least distressing

Plato’s Timaeus deploys ‘natural’ as a normative-evaluative category in which alignment with natural process produces pleasure and its violation produces pain, extending the concept into psychosomatic ethics.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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Kant had already stated that the organism is unlike a watch or any other mechanical entity. In a mechanical entity, the parts are the external conditions of each other’s operation … In an organism, however, the parts exist by means of each other

Thompson, reading Kant through Paley, argues that the natural organism is distinguished from artifact by its intrinsic self-organizing purposiveness, a distinction that grounds the modern biological conception of the natural.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Alchemy is a natural science which represents an attempt to understand material phenomena in nature; it is a mixture of the physics and chemistry of those early times and corresponds to the conscious mental attitude of those who studied it

Von Franz positions alchemy as the precursor to empirical natural science, arguing that its investigation of material phenomena mirrors the modern scientifically trained mind’s orientation toward observable nature.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting

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Evolution under natural selection is a slow process, Romanes argued, but some environmental demands require quite rapid adaptation if survival is going to be insured.

Hogenson, tracing the Baldwin Effect’s relevance for Jung’s evolutionary thinking, foregrounds the tension between natural selection as gradual mechanism and the demand for rapid intelligent adaptation, implicating the boundaries of the natural-biological concept.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting

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it was his duty to explain how it could have been done by natural means. Theological certitude is accommodated to a natural explanation according to a very classical framework in which the concepts of nature, experience, creation, and fall are strictly inseparable.

Derrida traces Condillac’s methodological imperative to provide natural explanations for the origin of language, revealing how ‘natural’ functions ideologically as the boundary marker between scientific and theological modes of account.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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the account of the genesis of the world describes a natural process with no connection to ritual. Nevertheless, despite its attempts at conceptual clarification, Hesiod’s thought remains mythic.

Vernant identifies the emergence of a concept of natural process in Hesiod as the pivotal transition between mythic cosmogony and proto-philosophical naturalism, yet shows the mythic register persisting within it.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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since there is but one nature, there is also but one natural will. And again, since the subsistences are unseparated, the three subsistences have also one object of will

John of Damascus employs ‘natural’ in its theological-ontological sense to distinguish the single natural will proper to a nature from the personal-dispositional will that varies among individuals, a distinction central to Christological anthropology.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting

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As ‘natural’ astrology it refers to changes in seasons, climate, weather; as ‘mundane’ astrology it deals with the rise and fall of kingdoms and nations

Rudhyar distinguishes ‘natural’ astrology — concerned with physical-cosmic cycles — from mundane and psychological astrology, using ‘natural’ to demarcate the domain of objective, measurable terrestrial influence.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936aside

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Beyond Greenspace: An ecological study of population general health and indicators of natural environment type and quality.

White’s epidemiological study invokes ‘natural environment’ in the contemporary public-health sense, correlating nature exposure with wellbeing — a pragmatic, empirical deployment of the term at the periphery of depth-psychological discourse.

White, Mathew P., Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing, 2019aside

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