Natural Worlds
Natural Worlds
Sir David Attenborough, great naturalist and celebrated TV presenter, an indisputable “national treasure”, likes to use the phrase “the natural world”.[1] I have no objection to this usage in its place (but see below), but I think the phrase deserves scrutiny (and he is not the only one who uses it). What does it mean? What does it refer to? What is the natural world? It is not the same as the actual world, construed as one among many possible worlds. It is part of the actual world—the part consisting of animals, plants (including fungi), and landscape (rocks etc.). But it’s narrower even than that: it refers to these things as they exist on planet Earth. It corresponds closely to what we call “nature”, as in “I love nature”. The idea is that the natural world is one world among many worlds existing on planet Earth—the physical world, the art world, the philosophical world. In practice, Sir David limits his interest to the natural animal world, leaving plants and rocks to one side; he is concerned mainly with animal life on Earth. His famous TV series is not about geology or ferns. In any case, the natural world is taken to be one world among many—one domain among many. There might be a series on TV in some remote galaxy called “Life on X” that deals with a quite different natural world. Natural worlds form a plurality, like possible worlds; we can quantify over them, as in “All natural worlds obey the laws of physics”. We might take this to be equivalent to “It is necessary that natural worlds obey the laws of physics”. Natural worlds are multiple, and ours is just one of them. The natural world of Mars, say, is different from the natural world of Earth; a series on the former would be pretty dull in comparison. Sir David’s Martian counterpart might want nothing to do with it (geology has always left him cold).
Now the first point I want to make is that Earth itself is home to several natural worlds: we have the geological world, the botanical world, and the zoological world, on the one hand, and the arctic, temperate, and tropical worlds, on the other. Not to mention the worlds of whales, monkeys, and bats. The phrase “the natural world” is a catch-all phrase, whose semantics is not exactly pellucid. Semantically, why doesn’t it include the physical world and the chemical world? These are both “natural”, aren’t they? Isn’t matter part of nature? The same for mind. There are many different worlds on Earth, each well-defined, but the natural world isn’t one of them; the phrase is intended to refer to the totality of them (a collective term). In fact, that phrase is pretty empty, a mere stand-in for something better that we can’t quite come up with. We fall back on the phrase because there are no preferable synonyms. It might even be said to be strictly meaningless. A tough-minded critic might insist that there is no such unified thing, only the multiple worlds I have listed. Reality is always natural, trivially so; we need a term that is more specific—a genuine sortal term. It is merely disjunctive, like “thing” or “object”—sorely in need of an individuating concept. Natural worlds don’t form a natural kind. How do we count them? What is their criterion of identity? We can talk that way if we must, having nothing better to offer, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we have a genuine concept here. This is a kind of dummy sortal concept, like thing. Sir David might have simply said “natural things”, in which case the semantic lameness would have been transparent (“I have always been interested in natural things”). The phrase is highly uninformative: everything is natural and nothing is not a thing. Why not just say “I am interested in animals” or “I am interested in plants” or “I am interested in rocks”? The phrase “the natural world” is just a cobbled-together piece of semi-nonsense—indispensable practically, perhaps, but semantically ill-formed. What does it mean? Isn’t it a bit like “the spirit world” or “the astrological world”? Exactly what is meant by these phrases? Is it perhaps used because it might seem a touch vulgar or unacademic to announce that you are interested in animals? And your interests might be even more confined: worms and insects leave you cold, but you lovelions and elephants. If so, you should say so and not hide behind something nebulous called “the natural world”.[2]
And what about “Life on Earth”: is that phrase kosher? It is intended as all-encompassing, but is it? Isn’t it both too wide and too narrow? Too wide because it includes plant life (not covered in the series), and too narrow because a lot of animal life is not on the earth. Some animal life exists in the earth, some swims in the seas, some flies above the earth, and some does a combination of the above. It would be more accurate to say “Life at or near the Earth”. In fact, the series mainly covered terrestrial life—walking life, basically. Again, there is not the natural unity promised by the phrase. Life on or around Earth is a miscellany, as is the so-called natural world. What is strange is that our language is so impoverished in this respect: why don’t we have a good word for the thing we are trying to refer to? Why can’t we come up with one? It’s suspicious. I have racked my brains and I can’t come up with anything satisfactory. This is why I don’t blame Sir David for resorting to the phrase; he has dedicated his life to something he can’t name or describe. A mysterious entity—the natural world. What other kind of world is there, and can’t you be more specific, please? He clearly loves apes and is impressed by lions and admires elephants, but what is this “natural world” he keeps banging on about so enthusiastically? Do I love “nature”? No, not all of it, but I am fond of many animals and admire a pretty flower; I don’t have any general love of nature as a whole (disease, death, cockroaches). Isn’t all this talk rather pretentious and vague, like “I love humanity”? Doesn’t it lend itself to a kind of emotional inauthenticity? When Sir David recounts his famous close encounter with a family of gorillas, he comes alive and hums with emotional intensity; blather about “the natural world” seems like a way to secure funding from the bigwigs at the BBC. The phrase is best permanently scare-quoted. It has a bureaucratic ring to it.[3]
[1] I recently had the pleasure of watching a documentary on PBS about the making of young David Attenborough’s wonderful “Life on Earth” series, which prompted this essay. I remember seeing him once on the tube in London in the 1970’s. I am a great admirer of his, but the phrase stuck out like a sore thumb and gave me a twinge of unease. This is an expression of that unease.
[2] Why even call it the natural world, as if it is just a special case of natural things like mountains and valleys, atoms and molecules? Why not call it the super-natural world, meaning that it is on a higher plane than more mundane things (like Superman)? It is a cut above the usual hoi-polloi. It is something special, amazing, spiritual even (though not divine). Granted this won’t include common-or-garden rocks, but it might include landscapes and seascapes.
[3] I intend no rebuke to Mr. Attenborough in this tetchy essay; we are all under the same semantic burden. But I do recommend refraining from using the phrase so lushly and lovingly. It isn’t what it purports to be—a lucid designator. I might also remark that it somewhat dehumanizes (!) animals by treating them as a kind of abstract stuff—bits of “the natural world”. Better to stick with specific species and individual animals: we should be concerned with the fate of apes and lions (etc.) not some vague pseudo-entity called “the natural world”. Words matter in politics and ethics. In some moods, I would like to ban the word “nature” and its cognates. I don’t love my bird Eloise because she is part of the natural world (oh so natural!); I love nature, inasmuch as I do, because Eloise is part of it. Also, my lizard, Ramone, and my cat, Blackie.
I also don’t begrudge Sir David’s use of “natural”. In this context, I read it as standing between the physical and the artificial or man-made: nature is part of the physical world but not exhausted by it, just as the human world is part of nature but also partly set apart from it. The use of “world” is more interesting. But it makes sense to me, since I do not understand the actual simply as one possibility among many; I understand the actual as containing possibilities, including the coming into being and evolution of different, perhaps related, worlds.
How does the geological fit in?
Yes, you are right: I take your point about geology. There are more worlds between the artificial or man-made and pure physics, and geology is part of nature too. Indeed, the world of life depends on it. This supports the broader idea that worlds can be nested, can come into being and fall apart, and can provide the conditions for later worlds. But perhaps this raises a further question about nature: when one world arises from and depends on another, is that dependence visible only because we can look at both worlds from outside, as it were, or is the history of that dependence somehow carried forward within the later world itself? For example, can we read life’s dependence on geology within the world of life itself?
To some degree, yes. The geology has to be just right to support any given species.
You didn’t mention the word ‘wildlife’, referring to the lives of animals in the natural world (all senses) unaffected and uninvolved with human animals and their social and domestic environments. I haven’t looked it up in the dictionary yet, but something like that seems to be the way people understand that word.
I think “wildlife” refers to animals in the wild, so much narrower than “the natural world” or “nature”. But plant life is also wild.
Couldn’t we also treat cosmology as part of nature, because it too is a historically developing world whose past is legible in its present state? It is not just underlying physics in the abstract, but the large-scale order that makes geology possible: stars, planets, heavy elements, and stable cosmic structures have to come into being before there can be a geological world at all. So cosmology would sit between fundamental physics and geology, just as geology sits between cosmology and life.
I rather agree, but notice that Sir David doesn’t seem to include cosmology in “the natural world”. He basically is smitten with Earth’s animal population.
And then there’s the natural world of single-celled life, such as bacteria. The visible world of animals and plants arises from, depends on, and remains nested within this deeper microbial world; life depends on geology, even as it modifies it, and geology depends on cosmology. You are right, then, to stress plurality: there are many natural worlds.
Exactly: a plurality of natural (or super-natural) worlds. Many Earths too.
This perspective adds depth to the concept of the alien as a being from another world, where “world” means not merely another place, but another layered order of nature. Does your perspective shed any light on what it would mean for two such worlds to come into contact at all?
It helps us formulate the true cosmic situation. It would help us communicate with such aliens. I find it an illuminating way to think.
I just saw a newscast about David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, in which the phrase “the natural world” occurred three times. He looked and sounded great. Happy birthday, Sir Dave–you are the man, or should I say the animal?
I am starting to think that many fundamental questions are really questions about the origin of worlds: the origin of the universe, life, consciousness, and perhaps many smaller worlds too. If a world is not just a place, but an order of possibilities, forms, histories, and relations, then the question becomes how such orders come into being.
On this picture, origins are not usually a coming-out-of-nothing, but a coming-out-of-something-else: life out of geology and chemistry, mind out of life, culture out of mind. Yet what emerges is not merely a rearrangement of what was already there; it can be a genuinely new world, with its own internal forms and possibilities. A world can therefore appear self-enclosed, almost complete in itself, while still resting on another world that made it possible.
More accessible cases may be found in geology, ecosystems, social worlds, or the emergence of multicellular life; but life itself remains a privileged border case, where the origin of a world is partly visible while still deeply mysterious. The origins of the universe and consciousness may pose the same question in its most extreme form, and may well lie completely beyond our grasp.
We can speak of emergent worlds. X evolves from Y.