Eric Voegelin, “Was ist Natur?” (1965)

Was ist Natur? is a single philosophical essay, a digression from a study of natural right. Its question is basic: appeals to what is right “by nature” are empty unless the meaning of nature has first been recovered.

Behauptungen, daß dieses oder jenes Rechte eines von Natur sei, sind leer, solange wir nicht wissen, was Natur ist.

English translation: Assertions that this or that right is one by nature remain empty so long as we do not know what nature is.

Voegelin’s thesis is that Aristotle still preserves a broad philosophical sense of nature as the order and movement of being, but Greek metaphysics narrows it into nature as form. He begins by testing the definitions of Metaphysik Δ—matter, form, and their compound—against society and person. If constitution is the form of the polis and citizens its matter, every revolution would create a new Athens; if soul is simply form of body, the experiences of soul as imprisoned, converted, reborn, or transformed by grace become unintelligible except through mythic language. The first movement of the essay therefore shows that the form-matter schema cannot ground the right order of human existence.

Ein weiterer Naturbegriff der Philosophie steht also einem engeren der Metaphysik gegenüber oder, genauer gesagt, eine umfassende Vorstellung davon, was Natur sei, ist durch die Entwicklung der Metaphysik verengt worden.

English translation: A broader concept of nature in philosophy thus stands over against a narrower one in metaphysics; or, more precisely, a comprehensive conception of what nature is has been narrowed by the development of metaphysics.

The historical problem is why this contraction occurred. Voegelin reconstructs early Greek philosophizing as a differentiation within the older experience of a god-filled cosmos. The Ionian arche remains close to cosmogonic myth—elemental origins replace divine genealogies—yet a new language of being begins to separate a relatively autonomous order of things from the divine.

Am Anfang des Philosophierens steht also die Dissoziierung des von Göttern durchwalteten Kosmos in eine entgötterte Ordnung der Dinge und ein Göttliches, dessen Beziehung zu dem neuentdeckten Charakter des Alls noch unklar ist.

English translation: At the beginning of philosophizing, then, stands the dissociation of the cosmos pervaded by gods into a de-divinized order of things and a divine whose relation to the newly discovered character of the All remains as yet unclear.

This differentiation yields genuine insight but also the danger of false separation. With transcendence-experience, the enduring structure of being can overshadow becoming; metaphysics thus tends toward an anti-mythic concentration on form. But the cosmos is not abolished when God and world are distinguished. Voegelin’s criticism of modern reduction follows: if the cosmic bond fades, the world becomes merely immanent, God becomes abstract being, and man becomes an epistemic subject confronting objects.

Das Mysterium des von Göttern durchwalteten Kosmos wird nicht dadurch aufgehoben, daß die Transzendenzerfahrung den Kosmos in Gott und Welt dissoziiert.

English translation: The mystery of the cosmos pervaded by gods is not abolished by the fact that the experience of transcendence dissociates the cosmos into God and world.

Plato, for Voegelin, kept dialectic and myth in proper relation: the Ideas belong to dialectical inquiry, while soul, judgment, cosmic cycles, and creation call for myth. The later dominance of form is explained by the demiurgic experience, in which God appears as orderer and human action as analogous ordering. This is not crude anthropomorphism; it expresses the attunement of God, world, and human knowing within one field of experience.

Dieser ontologische Komplex ist nur als ganzer sinnvoll — Philosophieren wird sinnlos, wenn es einen seiner Teile, ohne Rücksicht auf die anderen, isoliert.

English translation: This ontological complex is meaningful only as a whole—philosophizing becomes meaningless when it isolates one of its parts without regard to the others.

The final movement returns to Aristotle’s noetic depth. In discussing aition, telos, peras, and nous, Voegelin distinguishes causal series within the world from the question of the ground and of purposeful human action. Indefinite progression may apply to worldly sequences, but action requires an end; otherwise good and intellect vanish. In this register, nature is not a fixed inner-worldly form but the site where order is realized through participation in the ground.

In ihrem Kern ist die Natur des Menschen daher die Offenheit des fragenden Wissens und wissenden Fragens nach dem Grund.

English translation: At its core, the nature of man is therefore the openness of questioning knowledge and knowing questioning after the ground.

The essay’s relevance is its recovery of nature for natural right without reducing it to biology, social form, or immanent fact. Human nature is noetic openness: the capacity to question from within an experienced dependence on the ground of being. Hence myths of origin and philosophical symbols answer to an immediate experience of non-self-grounding being; discursive proofs of God do not improve on that experience.

Die Gottesbeweise können diesem Erfahrungskomplex nichts hinzufügen.

English translation: The proofs of God's existence can add nothing to this complex of experience.