The word ‘nature’ comes from the Latin natura, a translation of the Greek physis, a term that refers to that which springs forth by itself and persists. Its root, the verb phýō, alludes to arising from an inner principle. For Heraclitus, physis not only means growth, but also the expression of the becoming that permeates all things. Parmenides, on the other hand, defends the immobility of being, placing physis in a tension between permanence and transformation.
In Aristotle, this notion is systematized: nature is that which possesses within itself the principle of movement. It is not a reality split from being, but rather its teleological unfolding. Human rationality can know the natural order because it participates in the same intelligible structure. In this vision, the world does not oppose thought, but rather accompanies it. This equilibrium is broken with the Cartesian turn. In the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes makes a radical distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa. The spirit appears as a thinking substance, separate from extensive and quantifiable matter. This division inaugurates modern dualism, where nature is the object of calculation and the thinking subject the foundation of knowledge. From this split, two great fields of knowledge are organized. The natural sciences, inspired by Galileo and Newton, seek mathematical laws that describe the regular behavior of bodies. Nature is no longer understood as a living totality but is treated as a system of forces subject to necessity. For their part, the sciences of the spirit — with their notion consolidated in Dilthey — are oriented towards the study of self-consciousness, language and historicity.
Kant reinterprets this division by maintaining that the subject does not access things in themselves, but only phenomena, according to the conditions of understanding. Nature is thus constituted by the a priori forms of knowledge. In Hegel, this transformation reaches a decisive point: the spirit unfolds historically, producing the cultural forms that make its self-understanding possible. History is not an accumulation of facts, but the process by which the spirit recognizes itself. From this perspective, modern philosophy can be understood as a phenomenology of the spirit. It is no longer primarily concerned with being as nature, but with the symbolic mediations through which the human world is constituted. Language, ethics, art and politics become privileged spaces of interrogation. This shift does not cancel out the question of being, but it does reformulate it: being no longer appears as an immutable substance, but as a horizon that opens up in historical experience. Heidegger takes up this concern again in Being and Time, where he shows that being does not present itself as an object in front of a subject, but as meaning that emerges from the facticity of existence.
At this point, it is worth broadening our gaze beyond the West. In the tradition of Advaita Vedānta, especially in the work of Śaṅkara, the distinction between subject and object dissolves into a non-dual unity. Brahman, the absolute, is not a distant or transcendent entity, but the ultimate reality that underlies all appearances. From this perspective, nature is not external to the spirit, but a phenomenal expression of the indivisible one.
This understanding is not born of a synthesis between reason and experience, as in Kant, nor of a historical dialectic as in Hegel. It arises from a non-dual intuition that denies the separation between knowing and being. The empirical world, called Māyā, is not an illusion in the negative sense, but the transitory manifestation of the real, which must be traversed in order to reach non-distinction. Including this perspective allows us to relativize the limits of the modern paradigm. The separation between nature and spirit, so central to the West, does not present itself as a universal conceptual necessity. Rather, it is revealed as a situated construction that can be overcome through other forms of experience and thought.
Philosophy, in this expanded sense, is not limited to one tradition, but is open to diverse ways of understanding being. Interpreting the world does not imply imposing a structure on it, but rather allowing its meaning to emerge from non-fragmentary attention. Modernity, thus understood, does not represent the end of metaphysics, but one of its many possible developments.”
Prabhuji
