This essay is about the word natural, wherein I argue:
In older (but still very much extant) conceptions of the world, natural means something quite clear and relevant (assuming those worldviews are correct);
But, in a materialist conception, natural doesn’t mean anything particularly useful;
So, if you have a materialist viewpoint, you should probably stop using the word because it isn’t doing any honest linguistic work.
Isn’t it obvious what it means?
Natural medicine. Natural behavior. Natural foods. Natural products. Nature versus Nurture. Man versus Nature. What do we mean when we describe something as “natural” or pick out “nature” as opposed to some other state of being?
One would think we do know what we mean as “natural” is a relatively frequently used word in the English language. Still, I’m not sure what we intend it to mean makes any sense.
For example, what makes natural food natural? It seems to be the absence of “processing”, but only certain kinds of processing. Making honey, for example, requires quite a bit of busy bee business in which flower nectar is passed from bee to bee as it is broken down by specialized enzymes before being dehydrated (via bee wing beats) and stored in bee-manufactured honeycombs with bee-made wax seals. Honey doesn’t grow on trees you know! Also, bees are cool.
You can find honey at any organic and “natural” foods store. Why is this highly bee-processed product considered a natural food? Because it isn’t being processed by people. At least, not much. Presumably people are involved in getting the stuff into jars or plastic bears. Whether it’s food or medicine or any other sort of thing, the more people are involved in making it, and the more complicated their activity, the less natural the thing seems to be.
Let us consider why that should be so.
Where do people fit in the universe?
Mind-body dualism is the ancient view that mental activity is fundamentally distinct from the physical world. It is famously associated with René Descartes but has been espoused by many other thinkers and religions at least as far back as Plato.
Descartes held that only human beings had minds, while other animals were complex automata (robots), a position congruent with that of the Catholic Church where only people have spiritual souls independent from their material bodies.
In this view, people have two distinct natures, physical and spiritual, which correspond to two distinct realms. The triptych painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled “Last Judgment” captures this distinction well, including its moral aspects:
The middle panel depicts the grubby physical world on the bottom, clearly delineated from the radiant spiritual world on top. The material world has all sorts of base body business going on (and lots of people) while the spiritual world just has God, angels, and a few people. And trumpets, trumpets are also cool. The left panel (Eden before Adam and Eve were expelled) includes some animals and plants in the physical world, in addition to people. The right panel depicts the punishments that people receive if they give in to their physical natures.
People are the only element in common between the two realms and this is a key fact about people in mind-body dualism: they straddle the natural and the supernatural, and because of that people can do things that other living things can never do. They can write poetry, songs, and plays. They can talk and write and sing. And they can do good and commit evil. Because in mind-body dualism, people are partly magical creatures with unique powers.
The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo shows God bringing Adam into being via their outstretched fingers. It’s the poetry-writing end of Adam that is closest to God here, definitely not the pooping end or other naughty bits.
In mind-body dualism, when a person sits down to write a poem they are performing a minor miracle, that is to say, committing an act that cannot be explained by reference to the material part of the world. Because of the presence of human beings (and the active agency of other spiritual beings like God), some of what happens in the world is happening under a set of rules unconstrained by physical processes like physics, chemistry, or biology.
Given mind-body dualism, natural is a useful word
One role of language is communicating information to other people. In a universe where some things obey the rules of ordinary physical stuff while other things operate under a fundamentally different set of parameters, it’s going to be really important to know which is which. Is that approaching storm plain old weather or the embodiment of God’s wrath? The answer to that question determines what you do about it, i.e., you either take shelter or get down on your knees and pray.
If there really are two distinct but overlapping realms at work in the world, then we’re going to need ways of talking about them and natural (and its counterpart supernatural) will be an important and necessary part of everyday discourse, because knowing whether something is natural or not is going to be highly useful.
In mind-body dualism:
There are two realms, the physical and the spiritual, with different rules and powers.
Natural phenomena happen in the physical world and obey its rules.
People (but only people) have intermingled physical and spiritual natures.
People can do physical, natural things (like having a poop) that other animals do.
Among living beings, only people can do spiritual, supernatural things, like writing poetry, giving a speech, or building a complex civilization. Their partly spiritual nature explains why only people do these things.
If you believe in mind-body dualism, then much that is notable about human activity compared to other creatures, like cities and complex tool-making and industrial manufacturing and TikTok, is not natural, because it is the result of people acting, for better or worse, with their spiritual powers.
Materialism collapses this scheme
In materialism and the related philosophy of physicalism, there is no spiritual world at all, no God, no angels, no magical forces acting upon the universe. Everything is made out of the same stuff and obeys the same rules – including people.
In a materialist worldview, everything that people do can in principle be explained by the structure of their bodies and their relation to their physical environment. An activity like writing a poem would likely have a very very complicated explanation, referencing fine-grained neuro-anatomical structure, physics, chemistry, electromagnetism, etc., but it would still be a physical explanation not essentially different from any other. Maybe we’d never be able to write down the explanation in terms of physical laws because it’s just too complicated. No matter – the point is that writing a poem is not magic, it’s a complex physical process of swirling matter and energy. It’s natural.
Materialism is the belief that there is just one world, the physical world.
If there’s only one world then all phenomena are natural phenomena. Pointing at a human-made thing and calling it unnatural makes no sense because there’s no principled way to separate human activity from anything else on the basis of naturality. If what you really mean by “natural” is “not made by people” then you should just say “not made by people” and avoid confusion.
Wrapping Up
Ok, so maybe people won’t stop using a 5000 year-old word because a random person wrote a substack telling them not to. Maybe “natural” is a concept where you know it when you see it. This would all be fine and good except that nature is often invoked to justify a certain state of affairs, i.e., “natural” is often used with normative rather than descriptive valence. Natural foods, for example, are considered healthy by default but foods that people make might or might not be.
There is a curious inversion going on when natural things are considered good by default and human-made things are guilty before being proven innocent. This is probably not what Descartes had in mind unless you flip “natural” to mean “what God wants to happen” whereas people can fuck things up because of magical free will and all. But either way, a materialist can’t use “natural” coherently.
For a materialist to say something is good because it is natural is sneaking in an argument from authority that is doubly-suspect because materialism means there is no authority to appeal to. Materialism means it’s nature all the way down.
As a materialist myself, I’m going to do my best to stop using “natural”. You do you!