Philosophers have divided the natural and the artificial since ancient Greece. But do we know what we mean by that distinction, and where do humans and their actions fit? Graham Harman sets about flattening this divide. 

The drawing of a sharp distinction between the natural and the artificial goes all the way back to Ancient Greek philosophy. In Aristotle’s Physics there is a famous distinction between natural and violent motion: celestial bodies naturally move in a circle around the earth, terrestrial bodies move downward towards the center of the earth, and violent motion is whatever departs from these expected processes due to the intervention of an outside cause.

And so things remained until modern natural scientists reduced the difference between celestial and terrestrial motion to a universal physics, one that also erased the distinction between natural and violent motion, given that all forces are now said to be of the same kind. Hence, the difference between natural and artificial forces has little place in modern physical theory, which flattens these forces onto one and the same level of significance.

This reliance on nature as the difference-maker between the real and the unreal is characteristic of the entire philosophical tradition launched by Aristotle.

The same sort of thing happens with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, though here the distinction is somewhat cloudier. While for his teacher Plato the ultimate reality was the perfect forms of things, or universals, Aristotle developed an inverted theory in which concrete individual things are the most real that exist. Universals such as “cat,” “triangle,” or “tree” are for Aristotle derivative compared with the numerous specific cats, triangles, and trees that one encounters in experience. As a side effect of this difference, Plato’s emphasis on recollecting the forms already known deep in the mind is replaced by Aristotle’s prioritizing of sense-experience and a more secular version of memory as the repository of what has been learned in one’s lifetime on the earth. For the individual things of the world, Aristotle typically uses the term “primary substance,” or just “substance.” As he puts it in his Metaphysics: “[I]f substance is done away with, then all things are done away with.”

But what, exactly, is allowed to count as a substance? Here Aristotle seems to change his views slightly whenever he speaks about the topic. In Book Eta, Chapter 3, he stresses that everything is equally a substance: Socrates is not more a human than Bucephalus is a horse or the sun is a sun. This is countered by other passages where he speaks of substance in the comparative terms of “more” and “less.” For example: “substance seems to belong most evidently to bodies. That is why we say that animals and plants and their parts are substances, and also natural bodies, such as fire, water, earth, and each thing of this sort…” Elsewhere in the Metaphysics he is more decisive in calling nature the criterion for what counts as substance, saying that the things that everyone agrees are substance are “the natural ones– for example, fire, earth, water, air, and the other simple bodies, then plants and their parts, the animals and the parts of animals, and finally the [sky] and the parts of the [sky].”

Indeed, this reliance on nature as the difference-maker between the real and the unreal is characteristic of the entire philosophical tradition launched by Aristotle. His greatest modern heir is surely the German polymath G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716), who was not only a celebrated philosopher, but the co-inventor of calculus, an early proponent of life insurance, and a trailblazing student of Chinese culture.