O natural no mundo e perante o homem

Abstract

This is a philosophical essay on the interdependence between man and non-human nature. From the moment man no longer understands himself as the center of material nature and begins to acknowledge the “intrinsic value” of all things, independently the service they provide him, human being is marginalized, and at the same time rights are acknowledged for elements of nature – for animals, for rivers… With this approach, always more spread, one subverts the foundations of western legal systems, built on the Judeo-Christian anthropological assumptions. This work is structured in six sections, followed by the conclusions. We begin with an introductory part in which we display the realm of the debate between anthropocentric and biocentric postures, and we argue the reason of studying nature not only from a scientific approach but also from a philosophical and theological one. In sections 3, 4, and 5 we successively deal with three realities intimately related: creation, eternal law, and beauty. This analysis shows that only from a functional conception of nature we can understand it too as a bearer of moral message; a functional conception of nature assumes a causality, a creation, opposed to chance. We will see that, in creation, the logic impressed in the world is what the classicals called eternal law. We will argue that the notion of beauty itself is grounded upon nature and that all forms of art, from the most figurative to the most abstracted, each one in its manner, imitate it. The last section consists in a brief theological reflection on the sense of nature.