Second nature

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The Second Nature is a general philosophical concept, with a man-even sphere is described that it similar to the (first) natural surrounds.

Ancient conceptual history

Only since the middle of the 5th century BC In Greece the concept of human nature can be demonstrated, first as a medical term. Even with Democritus there is the idea that education creates something similar to nature: "Nature and education have a certain similarity, because education also transforms people, but through this transformation it creates nature (physiopoiei)." This thought is taken up by Aristotle : "Learning implies [the] putting oneself into the state that corresponds to nature." In the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle compares habit and natural disposition: "Because it is easier to change habit than nature. That is the only reason why it is difficult with habit, because it resembles nature, as Euenos also says: 'I believe that there has to be a long exercise, my dear, and then in the end it becomes nature for man. '"Only in his metaphysics , in the context of considerations of number theory, does Aristotle use the term hetéra phýsis (other nature) (Met. A 6, 987 b 33). In Greek, the term Hetera or deutera physique (second nature) takes place within the meaning of habit only when Galen , so in the 2nd century AD. Exercise and education, which is in classical Greece a common idea about Plato and Aristotle, transform the still insufficiently equipped nature of the person to be educated into a socially acceptable nature. For these Greek thinkers, however, education only effects an expansion, not a division, of human nature into two natures.

In the Latin tradition, the idea of ​​habit that creates a second nature, as it were, first appears in Marcus Tullius Cicero's work De finibus bonorum et malorum . There Cicero had the representative of Aristotle's doctrine say that "through habituation, to a certain extent, a second nature arises (deinde consuetudine quasi alteram quandam naturam effici), which induces people to do many actions that have nothing to do with pleasure." This leads to the historically influential formulas that are common in all European languages ​​and that habit creates (or habit is) a second nature.

Cicero directs his gaze both on habit as a force that creates a different nature in man, as it were, and on the external second nature as the product of human labor - which changes natural conditions. In De natura deorum he lets the representative of the Stoa say: "We try to create a second nature with our hands in the midst of nature (nostris denique manibus in rerum natura quasi alteram naturam efficere conamur)."

History of impact up to Hegel

These two passages in Cicero are the starting point for the uses of the expression 'second nature' in Latin prose and in all European cultural languages. The concept of habit (in the sense of being educated, habitus, character, etc.) as an inner second nature is very often taken up and applied in the most varied of contexts. Since the late renaissance - e.g. B. with the idea that the god-like creative power of man could bring about a second nature, with Giordano Bruno - and then in the context of art, culture, moral and social theory especially since the end of the 18th century, especially with Kant , Fichte , Schelling and Hegel , there is the idea of ​​man-made objects, institutions and historical relationships that appear and can work like a second nature.

In Hegel's philosophy the two strands of conceptual history, which were mostly separate according to Cicero, are brought together again. To his philosophy of the subjective mind, habit is second nature planted by education. In his philosophy of objective mind, both works of art and institutions such as morality, the legal system and the state can be viewed as second nature.

Pseudonature in the criticism of Marx, Lukács and Adorno

For Karl Marx , work, exchange and power relations produce transformations of nature and society, for which Marx uses expressions like 'naturally growing' (but not the term 'second nature'). The fact that the self-made world of things and goods can appear natural to their producers is the hexing of what is socially produced into what appears to be natural. Marx elaborated on such connections in the first volume of Capital and pointed out critically that, instead of appearing as self-confident producers, people are increasingly acting only as appendages to the production process. A criticism in this line of tradition "is fed by the interest in getting rid of the rule disguised as 'nature'."

In their ideology-critical analyzes of what appears naturally, which they interpret as something produced and made, Lukács and Adorno orient themselves on Hegel's concept of second nature and on Marx's critique of political economy. Georg Lukács uses the concept of second nature for his criticism of the alienated and reified world. For his theory of the novel , this second nature is meaningless; Having become alien to the subject , it appears like a prison that encloses its inmates. Therefore people cannot find themselves in the environments they have created themselves; the meaningful times are over. Lukács polemically identifies this second nature with the western bourgeois world. For the early Lukács, this critically viewed second nature is the historically produced world of conventions that cannot be circumvented for the individual. Theodor W. Adorno interprets it in his 1932 lecture given to the Frankfurt Kant Society, The Idea of ​​Natural History as “frozen history” and belonging to the “world of goods”. Only in history and class consciousness does Lukács connect second nature with the phenomena of reification and commodity fetishism ; it is important "to free oneself from this bondage under the resulting 'second nature'". In the Negative Dialectic, Adorno still speaks of “Hegel's theory of second nature”, which is “unchanged by a negative dialectic”.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics, Greek and German, ed. by H. Diels and W. Kranz, 13th edition 1968, p. 165.
  2. ^ Rhetoric, 1:11. Translated by Franz G. Sieveke, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 5th edition 1995, p. 63
  3. ↑ The Nicomachean Ethics, 1152 a 29-33, translated and ed. by Olof Gigon, Munich: Artemis / dtv, 4th edition 1981, p. 221.
  4. ^ J. Waszink: The ideas of the 'expansion of nature' in Greco-Roman antiquity and in early Christianity, in: Pietas. Festschrift for B. Kötting. Jahrbuch Antike Christianentum, supplementary volume 8 (1980), pp. 30–38, here: p. 30.
  5. ↑ Cicero: On the goals of human action / De finibus bonorum et malorum (Latin / German), V, 25, 74, ed., Translated and commented by O. Gigon and L. Straume-Zimmermann (Coll.Tusculum) , Munich - Zurich 1988, p. 382 f.
  6. ↑ On the nature of the gods. Three books / De natura deorum. Libri III (Latin / German), II, 60, 152, ed., Translated and explained by W. Gerlach and K. Bayer (Coll. Tusculum), Munich - Zurich, 3rd edition 1990, pp. 325– 327.
  7. ↑ Numerous references in addition to G. Funke: Gewohnheit (Archive for Conceptual History - Building Blocks for a Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by E. Rothacker), Bonn 1958.
  8. ↑ Cf. Norbert Rath: Second nature. Concepts of conveying nature and culture in anthropology and aesthetics around 1800, Münster: Waxmann 1996, p. 121 ff.
  9. ↑ Cf. Italo Testa (2008): Self-confidence and second nature. In: K. Vieweg / W. Welsch (eds.): Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'. A cooperative commentary on a key work of modernism, Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 2008, pp. 286–307; Christoph Menke: Second nature. Criticism and affirmation. In: M. Völk, O. Römer, S. Schreull u. a. (Ed.): "... if the hour permits". On the traditionality and topicality of critical theory, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2012, pp. 154–171; Maik Puzic: Spiritus sive Consuetudo. Hegel's reflections on a theory of second nature. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2017, p. 175 ff.
  10. ↑ Helmut Dahmer: Pseudo nature and criticism. Freud, Marx and the present, Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 1994, p. 400.
  11. ↑ Georg Lukács: The theory of the novel. A historical-philosophical attempt on the forms of the great epic . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1963, p. 61 ff.
  12. ↑ Tanja Dembski: Paradigms of the romantic theory at the beginning of the 20th century. Lukács, Bachtin, Rilke . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, p. 323.
  13. ↑ Adorno: The idea of ​​natural history. In: ders .: Collected writings 1: Early philosophical writings . Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 1973, p. 355 f.
  14. ↑ Lukács: History and Class Consciousness. Studies on Marxist dialectics, Neuwied-Berlin, 3rd edition, 1967, p. 97 (quoted after the pagination of 1923).
  15. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialektik, 2nd edition 1970, Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp, ​​p. 46.