The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature

"Many people know Hadot outside of France for his influence on Foucault’s later work. Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality was largely indebted to Hadot. In Hadot as in Foucault, there’s the preoccupation with philosophy as epimeleia heautou (care of the self), and as being principally concerned with the cultivation of happiness, where the theoretical concerns are secondary in some cases. As in the Stoics, you need to have a correct view of, say, physics—of how the natural world works—in order to be happy, because if you don’t, then you’ll constantly be slipping up in your interpretation of what’s going on in the world, which will make you unhappy. Now, I’ve actually been interested in making a case that something similar continues well into the 17th century. Descartes and Leibniz both continue to share such a conception of the project of philosophy, which is why they’re both so preoccupied with things like pharmaceutical recipes and studying problems having to do with health and illness, because it’s central to the cultivation of ‘the good life’. Hadot stops in Late Antiquity, in Hellenistic philosophy. Foucault follows him in that regard. My suspicion is that it’s actually a very long and continuous tradition. This is yet another sense in which the early moderns are more continuous with the ancients than we often think they are. The real break is not in the 17th century, but in the 19th century. “What does it mean to say that nature loves to hide?” But that’s a different aspect of Hadot’s work than what I actually remember giving me a ‘wow’ moment, which is Le voile d’Isis . This is a reference to a fragment of Heraclitus. The Greek is Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ . ‘Nature loves to hide’ is how we usually translate this, and the reason why I cite the Greek is because it’s really an open question whether we have adequately grasped what’s going on in those three words. In fact, each of the words is so polysemous that when we say ‘ Φύσις ’ is ‘nature’, we’re just estimating or roughly trying to capture what’s going on; ‘loves’ is also really tough there. And ‘to hide’: what does it mean to say that nature loves to hide? Presumably it’s some kind of recognition that there’s a world out there that isn’t necessarily the world as it’s presenting itself to our senses. But does that world have intentions and desires? Is she hiding from us for a reason, or is it just somehow in the nature of things? It’s this kind of reflection that is archaically good evidence for the beginning of what we would much later come to think of as ‘natural science’. Now, ‘Nature’—and Hadot is sensitive to this as well; it’s the same in French as in English and indeed in Latin—is a term that comes from a root having to do with biological generation, to be born. Whereas in Greek, φύση , from which we get the word ‘physics’ is connected to a root having to do with light, φως — we also get words like ‘phenomena’, φαινόμενα, from the same root. So, whether we’re dealing with the same concept of nature as the Greeks were is really a difficult question to crack. But it’s fundamental if we want to suppose that it’s from the Greeks that we have the origins of the tradition of natural philosophy that would then become science. I wouldn’t say exclusively, but certainly it’s a way into the problem. There’s no better point of entry into the question of the continuity of the concept of Nature from the ancient Greeks to today than through this fragment. What Hadot really helped me to realise was how unreflective we are when we study the past few centuries of thinking about nature—how unreflective we are about how difficult and slippery this concept is. One of the things that I’ve often emphasised when I write about modern natural philosophy is that one way of thinking of the transformation that was underway in the period is that for the first time, the motion of things like projectiles, billiard balls, pebbles came to be seen as the paradigm of natural motion. Whereas for the Greeks, it was for the most part animal growth in generation and locomotion that was the paradigm of what nature’s up to. Then one can try, to some extent, to understand what planets, and stars, and the tides—and maybe even projectiles and pebbles—are doing when they move on analogy to what we know best, which is what we think of today as biological motion. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’ve always been frustrated by the way people invoke examples in philosophy pedagogy, particularly when they’re philosophers who don’t do history. We talk about the external world, and people say, ‘Well, what do you mean by that?’ and the response is, ‘Oh, you know, just rivers, trees, mountains and stuff’—as if there weren’t really something to think about in each of these unique cases. What Hadot is really good at doing is taking this very fluid, slippery notion of nature as just the external world in general, and trying to articulate, ‘Okay, but what are the paradigmatic instances of that? And what difference does it make to take one paradigmatic instance rather than another?’"