Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker
Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai
philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to
hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of
this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure
of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of
both the ancients and later thinkers such as Goethe, Rilke,
Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Hadot traces successive
interpretations of Heraclitus' words. Over time, Hadot finds,
"Nature loves to hide" has meant that all that lives tends to die;
that Nature wraps herself in myths; and (for Heidegger) that Being
unveils as it veils itself. Meanwhile the pronouncement has been
used to explain everything from the opacity of the natural world to
our modern angst.
From these kaleidoscopic exegeses and usages emerge two
contradictory approaches to nature: the Promethean, or
experimental-questing, approach, which embraces technology as a
means of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets;
and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, approach, according to
which such a denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. In place of
these two attitudes Hadot proposes one suggested by the Romantic
vision of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schelling, who saw in the veiled
Isis an allegorical expression of the sublime. "Nature is art and
art is nature," Hadot writes, inviting us to embrace Isis and all
she represents: art makes us intensely aware of how completely we
ourselves are not merely surrounded by nature but also part of
nature.
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