Works of Art and Works of Nature

In our age of industrial technics we often find the distinction between natural things and man-made products blurred or erased; think, for instance, of how the project of artificial intelligence seeks to replicate a human mind -- a natural occurrence -- on computer hardware, as though the mind exists as an abstract form that can be freed from one physical instantiation and reconstituted in entirely different physical material. David Hume pointed out that Newton's design argument confused the cosmos with a mechanism, failing to consider that other analogies (such as that of an animal) might be even more appropriate, an error made more and more earnestly even by those who would later deny the design argument; and now society, living beings, and the cosmos as a whole suffer being conceived of as mechanisms that operate (or should operate) for maximal efficiency towards certain quantifiable results. However, it goes unquestioned -- and therefore, unproven -- whether the model of the machine can encompass the reality of living beings, or of society, or of the cosmos as a whole; and Aristotelian phenomenology makes a strong case against such a confusion, for the works of the artisan are ontologically distinct from the works of nature.

Aristotle gives an initial definition of natural things as those things that have an internal impulse towards motion, while stating that artifacts lack such an internal disposition:

For [the things of nature] has in itself a source of motion and rest, either in place, or by growth and shrinkage, or by alteration; but a bed or a cloak, or any other such kind of thing there is, in the respect in which it has happened upon each designation and to the extent that it is from art, has no innate impulse of change at all. (Physics 192b10-20)

At this juncture in Aristotle's investigation into nature one can safely think of motion as change generally, rather than as primarily locomotion; and so Aristotle characterizes as natural things which have an internal principle of change. Natural things change in a way appropriate to the sort of thing they are (for example, when a tree grows upward towards the sunlight, this change constitutes an expression of what it means to be a tree), so the internal principle of motion can be understood as the sort of motion that belongs properly to a thing by virtue of what it is. Some motions can be said to be natural and others unnatural: when a person lays down to sleep, the motion of laying down and the change from being awake to being asleep arises from within that person, and can be understood as an outward manifestation of that person and of human beings generally; however, if a person is knocked to the floor by something striking him, this motion is unnatural in that the striking thing imposes the motion from without.

Natural and unnatural motion can happen only to a natural thing, while a work of art (here understood in the broad sense of craftsmanship) does not have its own natural form of motion. The artifact undergoes change both from within and without: within from the material out of which the artisan formed it, and without from the design of the artisan. The work of the artisan necessarily constitutes a certain violence: a tree, formerly having its own nature and principle of growth, suffers being cut down and hewn into the form of a bed frame; the nature of being a bed-frame does not belong to the tree itself, but must be imposed from without, and the wood of the bed will not strive to maintain the integrity of the bed through time, but will decay as wood does and eventually return to the earth. Natural things are at work being and maintaining themselves in a way that incorporates the material of other things -- think of how when an animal eats an apple it destroys the nature of the apple and turns the material towards itself -- but in the case of natural things, it is the nature or form of the thing itself which recruits foreign material into its own nature; however, the artifact does not recruit material into its own way of maintaining itself, rather the artisan forces the material and the form together from the outside--artificially.

The internal principle of motion or change constitutes the means by which the being maintains itself in its being (Heidegger calls this "care"), and so the natural changes proper to a thing such as a tree maintain it in its being: the tree grows up from a seed, pushing through the ground, and opens itself up to the world as a tree. By shedding its leaves during the winter, growing them during the summer, reaching ever upwards, and dropping seeds down the the earth, the tree manifests itself as a tree, the tree is its own striving towards manifestation; it initiates its natural changes from within and expresses them outwardly, and in this activity has its being. An artifact suffers changes, for it has no internal principle of motion or change that allows it to outwardly express its inward possibilities, and so, every once in a while, it must be repaired or replaced; the artifact has no intrinsic way to be at work maintaining itself or striving towards its own expression, but only the natural tendencies of the things out of which it is constructed, and the efforts of the artisan to force and reinforce a functional structure upon it. A bed does not work at keeping its nature intact by actively looking after itself and recruiting new material into its active being, rather the wood rots and the artisan replaces it or makes another bed. Thus, if the being of a thing consists in the work to persist over time that it initiates from within itself, we can say that artifacts, in the purest sense, do not possess an authentic being, except insofar as they imitate natural things.

This difference between natural things and artificial things ought not be considered to be "merely" mental, having no hold in nature as it is in itself: the highest manifestation of each natural being occurs in its being understood by mind, for here the natural thing exists at its most purely actual; beings can be understood -- which simply means: brought to their highest actuality -- when one knows the "why" of their being (194b20-25). In order to further elucidate the ontological difference between natural beings and artifacts, we should consider that to which both sorts of things owe their being, and how they differ. When we inquire into the sources of a thing's being, we inquire into what bears responsibility for that thing, and we know in advance that what bears responsibility for the being of a natural thing must be, in some sense, the natural thing itself; for the natural thing's being is nothing other than its effort to persist and express itself over time, and a natural thing must (as we said above) initiate this activity from within. However, if we wish to inquire further to the responsibility for the thing's presence, we see that the thing can be said to be responsible for its being in several different ways.

In order for a thing to hold itself in being, it must have something to hold together and to recruit when it needs more material; when the tree acts on itself, we mean "tree" and "itself" in slightly different ways, for the tree in the primary sense is its being-at-work-staying-itself, while the tree in the second sense is that out of which the tree is made. The former acts upon the latter, and we call natural beings composite, having an active and a passive part. Motion, in its highest sense, is the preservation of the thing's potencies as such, and so motion guarantees a reserve of material for the thing to act upon.

Second, in order for a thing to hold itself in being, it must have something that it holds together, and this something must be intelligible; for example, the sheep dog chases after its charges and thereby maintains that by which one recognizes it as being a "sheep dog" and which all individual sheep dogs possess. What the natural being holds together and offer to the external world belongs to all things of its kind, and does not depend on an individual instantiation of itself; for example, if one sheep dog perishes, one can still recognize what distinguishes sheep dogs as sheep dogs. Aristotle calls this the look that one discloses in speech; Aristotle means by this formulation what occurs when one says "that looks like a sheep dog."

As a finite thing must have a beginning that we call coming-into-being, and this change must begin at a certain point, something must be responsible for initiating the coming into being of the thing. In order for a change to occur, something must cause it to occur, and in the case of the change of coming into being from not-being, the thing responsible cannot be the thing brought into being, for then it would precede itself; and therefore, the individual thing -- while it can be responsible for its changes once it exists -- cannot be responsible for its own coming into being. In works of art, we rightly call the craftsman responsible for the coming into being of the artifact, but in works of nature, the thing responsible can only be a thing of the same sort (a sheepdog must come into being from other sheepdogs); one can distinguish natural things from unnatural things by asking whether the thing was brought into being by the same sort of thing.

However, a thing undergoes other changes other than coming into being, and if these other changes are natural then they will be initiated from within the thing itself, rather than from without. We have already mentioned several marks of natural things -- that they initiate motion from within, that another thing of their own sort is responsible for their coming into being, that their form and matter belong to one another -- but all these should be drawn together under a final sort of responsibility: that wholeness towards which the thing directs its activity of maintaining itself through time. The three sorts of responsibility discussed above are likewise subordinate to this kind of responsibility, the actively self-maintained wholeness of the thing that Aristotle calls the for-the-sake-of-which; this can be seen when the sheepdog corrals the sheep, when it escapes from the powerful predator, when it eats--all of these aim towards the maintenance of the whole sheepdog under which are gathered all other aspects of the sheepdog.

This final aspect only natural things possess, for the responsibility for the presence of an artifact cannot be brought under this final cause, as it lacks the requisite unity: the material has no inherent desire to be brought together into the intelligible form of the artifact, and so the intelligible form does not belong to the matter that suffers to receive it; neither does that which is responsible for the coming into being of the artifact manifest the same intelligible form that he or she brings into being in the artifact; and certainly the artifact does not actively maintain the harmony of these aspects, directing them towards the wholeness that they help constitute. Aristotle calls this wholeness the nature of a thing, and it is precisely the presence of nature that determines works of nature in their being, and likewise it is precisely the lack of this nature that determines works of art in their being.