Against Nature

Lorraine Daston, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, opens this philosophical essay by challenging a claim made by the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Kant assumed that reason is identical regardless of the species that possesses it. Daston proposes an alternative philosophical anthropology, one that investigates human reason as shaped by the kind of organisms we are. The question she poses is deceptively simple: Why do human beings, across many cultures and epochs, persistently look to nature as a source of norms for human conduct? Stoic sages modeled the good life on the stars; revolutionary France and the early United States grounded human rights in the laws of nature; contemporary headlines about avalanches and hurricanes invoke "The Revenge of Nature" (3). Nature has been enlisted to emancipate and to enslave.

Philosophers have long insisted that no legitimate inference can be drawn from how things are ("is") to how they should be ("ought"). To attempt such an inference is to commit what the philosopher G. E. Moore called the "naturalistic fallacy." Despite centuries of such criticism, from David Hume through Kant to John Stuart Mill, the temptation to extract norms from nature endures. Rather than attempting once more to separate the two, Daston aims to understand why previous attempts have failed. Her answer lies not in popular error but in a distinctly human form of rationality, rooted in the perception of order as both fact and ideal. She identifies three recurrent forms of natural order within the Western intellectual tradition: specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws.

Specific natures refer to the essence of a thing, what makes it what it is. The ancient Greek physis shares its root with the word for "plant" and implies self-directed growth; the Latin natura derives from the verb "to be born." Specific natures encompass a thing's characteristic form, properties, and tendencies: chestnut trees grow from seeds, foxes are cunning, tadpoles mature into frogs. The concept finds parallels across traditions; the Sanskrit dharma, for instance, holds that it is the nature of snakes to bite and of gods to give. Though the underlying metaphysics has shifted over time, from Aristotelian inner principles to DNA, the idea is resilient. Classification accompanies specific natures: common nouns testify to the cognitive necessity of categories, but specific natures go further, solidifying properties and history into stable kinds with predictable tendencies and faithful reproduction. Disruptions to this order are figured as monsters, beings that transgress species boundaries. Aristotle relied on reproduction to distinguish genuine specific natures from products of art or chance, arguing that lending money at interest was "contrary to nature" because money cannot reproduce, an argument with lasting consequences for usury legislation.

Local natures concern the power of place: the characteristic combinations of flora, fauna, climate, and geology that give a landscape its physiognomy, from desert oasis to tropical rain forest. The ancient Hippocratic medical text Airs Waters Places (fifth century BCE) advised traveling physicians to study how winds, seasons, water, and soil affect local inhabitants, since medical knowledge from one locale cannot be readily generalized. A tradition running through the political philosopher Montesquieu's On the Spirit of the Laws (1748) and the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt's Views of Nature (1807) continued to elaborate on this interweaving of place and custom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theories of equilibrium gave the idea new momentum: nature was reimagined as a harmonious whole whose parts exist in delicate balance. If monsters are the prototypical disruption of specific natures, disequilibria play that role for local natures. The "nature's revenge" (21) of contemporary headlines involves not a personified nature but a self-regulating system thrown off balance. Daston observes that this phrase is invoked only when human complicity is present: after the 2011 disasters in Japan, "nature's revenge" applied almost exclusively to the Fukushima nuclear accident, not to the earthquake and tsunami that killed far more people.

Universal natural laws, the third form of natural order, define a uniform and inviolable order everywhere and always the same, with Newton's universal gravitation, set forth in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), as the prototype. Before the seventeenth century, nature was understood as a patchwork of regularities of different kinds and degrees of strictness, following customs that occasionally admitted exceptions. The modern concept emerged from a convergence of theology, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Decisive was a voluntarist theology that imagined God as a "divine legislator" (25-26) imposing laws on nature as a monarch imposes laws on a kingdom. Machine analogies, especially to clockwork, helped establish the concept: Robert Boyle repeatedly invoked the astronomical clock of Strasbourg Cathedral as an analogy for a cosmos that, once set in motion, unfolds without further intervention. During the Enlightenment, the Newtonian vision inspired political reformers. Both the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) enlisted the language of rights guaranteed by nature, and the order of natural laws became a secular metaphysics despite its theological origins.

Having established these three forms of natural order, Daston turns to the emotional responses each provokes when violated: horror at monsters that breach specific natures, terror at imbalances that capsize local natures, and wonder at the indeterminism that breaks universal natural laws. She calls these "the passions of the unnatural," using "passion" in its original sense, from the Greek pathema and Latin passio, to denote extreme states suffered rather than merely felt. These passions blur the boundary between the moral and the natural: the horror of a human ear apparently growing from a mouse's body mingles natural boundary-crossing with moral taboo; the terror of a flood mingles physical danger with guilt. Each passion has a cognitive component, triggered when a major disruption of order is registered as such, presupposing acquaintance with the orderliness that has been breached. Daston distinguishes these "dumbstruck passions" (41) from moral passions like indignation, which targets responsible persons and aims through verbal reproach to reintegrate the culprit into the community. There is no temptation to scold a monster or berate a drought.

Daston then argues that the connection between normativity, the quality of telling us what should be, and order explains why humans turn to nature. Chaos is the most terrifying of collective nightmares: without some background of order, no norm can take hold, since norms imply consistency, community, and a temporal horizon stretching into past and future. She draws a crucial distinction between the content of specific norms, which vary dramatically across cultures, and normativity itself, which is universal. Drawing on the philosopher Ian Hacking's characterization of humans as homo depictor, beings who compulsively make representations, Daston argues that nature holds two advantages as a source of moral models. First, it is everywhere and always on display, possessing a thing-like, publicly contemplable solidity that social orders lack. Second, nature is the repository of all conceivable orders, so rich in variety that it has outstripped human inventiveness. Daston likens nature to a Renaissance Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, teeming with specimens, but distinguishes nature in one crucial respect: even at its most improbable, nature exhibits some kind of order. Nature is the source of all expectations, and without well-founded expectations, the world of causes and promises falls apart.

Yet this very abundance means natural order alone cannot dictate which norms to follow, since opponents can always counter with equally natural examples supporting opposite positions. In her conclusion, Daston returns to Kant and offers three responses to persistent skeptics. First, naturalization is weaker than critics fear: there are natural orders aplenty to support or subvert any norm, so no single appeal to nature can serve as a decisive political weapon. Second, the appeal to nature is fundamentally about the link between order and normativity as such, not between any particular natural order and any particular set of norms; the presumption of uniqueness makes the appeal fallacious, not the presumption of order. Third, human reason in human bodies is the only kind of reason we have, and the philosophical yearning for disembodied reason has always been entangled with theology. Daston closes by suggesting that we might follow Kant in spirit by exploring the capacities of specifically human reason rather than lamenting its boundaries.