Naturalism Quotes

“Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity.

This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies.

And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology.

Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world.

Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation.

Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests?

What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.”
― David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature

“Nature doesn’t belong to us, we belong to nature.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mission Reality

“They never thought to think that a striped anachronism, one of the old gods, walked unseen among them. The old ones had forgotten; the children had never known. A great thing from an age almost passed, searching for a last place where the deer were plenty and the rivers ran clean.”
― Paul Rosolie, The Girl and the Tiger

“Whatever the particularities of their history, these fallen trees have now started the next part of their journey through the ecology of this old-growth forest. Fungi, salamanders, and thousands of species of invertebrates will thrive in and under the rotting trunks. At least half a tree's contribution to the fabric of life comes after its death, so one measure of a vitality of a forest ecosystem is the density of tree carcasses. You're in a great forest if you cannot pick out a straight-line path through fallen limbs and trunks. A bare forest floor is a sign of ill health.”
― David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature

“Beauty and ugliness do not exist in nature. It's the humans who created these concepts to measure the appeal of an organic or non-organic object to themselves.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Nature is the Creator, I just do the fine tuning”
― Steven George Clark

“In front of the unfathomable vastness of the universe, we humans are insignificant particles of protoplasmic substance. But that’s precisely what makes us humans – we make sense out of chaos, and in that sense we produce meaningfulness. And we then pour that meaningfulness in our lives, which then outpours into the world. Thus, we provide meaning to a meaningless world – we provide meaning to a meaningless universe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Saint of The Sapiens

“I HATE Unnatural, Abnormal, Disgusting, Sick, Ugly, Unfit, Funny, Idiotic, Stupid, Nonsense, Immature, SICK minded, Narrow Minded, Uncultured, Filthy, Cheap, Superstitious, Ignorant, Perverted, Paraphilic, Illogical Gender Biased/sexist, Stereotypical female sex Objectification based ABNORMAL inappropriate activities and Sexism or Sexist Mentality. And people who practice this Abnormality, they are Unnatural, Abnormal, Disgusting, Sick, Ugly, Unfit, Funny, Idiotic, Stupid, Nonsense, Immature, SICK minded, Narrow Minded, Uncultured, Filthy, Cheap, Superstitious, Ignorant, Perverted, Paraphilic, Illogical Gender Biased/sexist, Stereotypical female sex Objectification based SICK minded humanoid Species But They Are NOT HUMAN.
And I Support Solid Male Sex Objectification or Male Sexualization based world or Male Sex Symbol or Male Sexual Image or whatever you say. Because This world is Natural, Normal, Real and Truth. And Male Sex Objectification or Male Sexualization is a Part of The Real Sex. Because Male Beauty and Male Body is a Work of Art and It's A Gift for women From God. And That's The Truth.”
― Nirzhar Hussain

“Plants are our food, oxygen, and medicine. Some even say they are one of the most pleasurable experiences on earth! From the flowers to the trees and the seas filled with coral dreams; the earth’s natural flora has inspired and enhanced humans for as long as time can tell. That’s why the power of plants is the key to unlocking our enjoyment of life.”
― Natasha Potter

“Truth is not supernatural, nor does it have any nature, for truth is nature. Perception of nature, is the perception of truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Lives to Serve Before I Sleep

“The psychology of the naturalistic drama, in which the characters are interpreted as social phenomena, has its origin in this urge which the spectator feels to identify himself with his social compeers. Now, however much objective truth there may be in such an interpretation of the characters in a play, it leads, when raised to the status of an exclusive principle, to a falsification of the facts. The assumption that men and women are merely social beings results in just as arbitrary a picture of experience as the view according to which every person is a unique and incomparable individual. Both conceptions lead to a stylization and romanticizing of reality. On the other hand, however, there is no doubt that the conception of man held in any particular epoch is socially conditioned and that the choice as to whether man is portrayed in the main as an autonomous personality or as the representative of a class depends in every age on the social approach and political aims of those who happen to be the upholders of culture. When a public wishes to see social origins and class characteristics emphasized in the human portraiture, that is always a sign that that society has become class-conscious, no matter whether the public in question is aristocratic or middle-class. In this context the question whether the aristocrat is only an aristocrat and the bourgeois only a bourgeois is absolutely unimportant.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“You can't stop them. Some people don't care if a girl cries, or a tiger dies. They have rules. I did what I had to and we survived.”
― Paul Rosolie, The Girl and the Tiger

“Perception of nature is perception of truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“What is life - life is not merely the functional expression of protoplasmic substance - it is the functional expression of protoplasmic substance that holds unimaginable potential for growth and progress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine

“There never was any separate and supernatural trinity - it has always been the human mind playing the triangle.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine

“Essentially that which is only matter, and the sciences that can, through verifiable methods, explore that which we know exists, through the means of...you know, touching, tasting, seeing, and so on...as well as using other instrumentation and so on...is very useful. The question winds up being: ultimately one of: 'Is that all there is?' And going and saying there wasn't even an understanding of matter as we understand it today prior to [...] about the time of Descartes...um, I don't know if the historical argument's the best one to make in that case. But one thing I can say is that thinking that all that exists is that which we can perceive with the five senses is in no way provable –and then if we talk about, 'Well, what is the essence of something?', then we run into a whole other mess.

But if we're talking in the context of modernism, where people have gone and become wholly materialistic, the answers become incredibly simple. Incredibly simplistic. And ultimately, I'm not convinced of their accuracy; not only am I not convinced of their accuracy, but I'm not convinced that it's good for humankind in general: because ultimately we're going to wind up killing ourselves off, if all we believe in is that which is material.”
― Matthew Laine

“La ciencia es contraria a la sensibilidad de los animales hasta que ésta ya no pueda negarse. ¿No sería mejor argumentar, por si acaso, lo contrario, para no maltratar innecesariamente a los animales?”
― Peter Wohlleben, La vida interior de los animales

“To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing never finished process.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Nature

“This attitude finds a late but still abundantly clear expression in the conventions of the classical court theatre, in which the actor, quite regardless of the demands of stage deception, addresses the audience directly, apostrophizes it, as it were, with every word and gesture, and not only avoids ‘turning his back’ on the audience but emphasizes by every possible means that the whole proceeding is a pure fiction, an entertainment conducted in accordance with previously agreed rules. The naturalistic theatre forms the transition to the absolute opposite of this ‘frontal’ art, namely the film, which, with its mobilization of the audience, leading them to the events instead of leading and presenting the events to them, and attempting to represent the action in such a way as to suggest that the actors have been caught red-handed, by chance and by surprise, reduces the fictions and conventions of the theatre to a minimum. With its robust illusionism, its forthright and indiscreet directness, its violent attack on the audience, it expresses a democratic conception of art, held by liberal, anti-authoritarian societies, just as clearly as the whole of the courtly and aristocratic art—by its mere emphasis of the stage, the footlights, the frame and the socle—is the unmistakable expression of a highly artificial, specially commissioned occasion, from which it is obvious that the patron is an initiated connoisseur who does not need to be deceived.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“The doctrine of spontaneous naturalism of Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy are achievements of fifteenth century. In all this light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“The shortness of High Renaissance is typical of the fate of all the periods of classical style in modern times; since the end of feudalism the epochs of stability have been nothing but short episodes. The rigorous formalism of the High Renaissance has certainly remained a constant temptation for later generations, but, apart from short, mostly sophisticated, and educationally inspired movements, it has never prevailed again. On the other hand, it has proved to be the most important undercurrent in modern art; for even though the strictly formalistic style, based on the typical and the normative, was unable to hold its own against the fundamental naturalism of the modern age, nevertheless, after the Renaissance, a return to the incoherent, cumulative, co-ordinating formal methods of the Middle Ages was no longer possible. Since the Renaissance we think of a work of painting or sculpture as a concentrated picture of reality seen from a single and uniform point of view - a formal structure that arises from the tension between the wide world and the undivided subject opposed to the world. This polarity between art and the world was mitigated from time to time, but never again abolished. It represents the real inheritance of Renaissance.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“Naturalism is not a homogeneous, clear-cut conception of art, always based on the same idea of nature, but changes with the times, concerned with a concrete task and confining its interpretation of life to particular phenomena. One professes a belief in naturalism, not because one consider a naturalistic representation more artistic a prior than a stylizing, but because one discovers a trait, a tendency in reality on which one would like to put more emphasis, which one would either to promote or fight against. Such a discovery is not itself the result of naturalistic observation, on the contrary, the interest in naturalism is the result of such a discovery. The 1830 generation begins its literary career with the recognition that the structure of society has completely changed; partly it accepts, partly opposes this change, but, in any case, it reacts to it in an extremely activism fashion and it naturalistic approach is derived from this activism. Naturalism is not aimed at reality as a whole, not at "nature" or "life" in general, but at social life in particular, that is, at that province of reality which has become specially important for this generation.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“But the main source of the naturalistic outlook is the political experience of the generation of 1848: the failure of the revolution, the suppression of the June insurrection and the seizure of power by Louis Napoleon. The disappointment of the democrats and the general disillusionment caused by these events finds its perfect expression in the philosophy of the objective, realistic, strictly empirical natural sciences. After the failure of all ideals, of all Utopias, the tendency is now to keep to the facts, to nothing but the facts. The political origins of naturalism explain in particular its anti-romantic and ethical features: the refusal to escape from reality and the demand for absolute honesty in the description of facts; the striving for impersonality and impassibility as the guarantees of objectivity and social solidarity; activism as the attitude intent not only on knowing and describing but on altering reality; the modernism which keeps to the present as the sole subject-of consequence; and, finally, its popular trend both in the choice of subject and in the choice of public.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“In this choice of trivial, ‘unpoetic’ motifs the same democratic spirit is expressed as in the choice of the human types of Courbet, Millet and Daumier— with the sole difference that the landscape painters seem to say: nature is beautiful at all times and in all places, no ‘ideal’ motifs are necessary to do justice to its beauty, whereas the figure painters want to prove that man is ugly and pitiable no matter whether he is oppressing others or being oppressed himself. But, in spite of its sincerity and simplicity, the naturalistic landscape soon becomes just as conventional as the romantic had been. The romantics painted the poetry of the sacred grove, the naturalists paint the prose of rural life—the clearing with the grazing cattle, the river with the ferry, the field with the hayrick.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Nature doesn't create questions without creating the answers first.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon

“Nature has placed in your heart such strength to which there is no match.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon

“You may play well or you may play badly; the important thing is that you should play truly.”
― Mikhail Shchepkin

“Human brain is the supreme creator of all fortune. It is the biggest miracle of nature which makes all other miracles possible.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ain't Enough to Look Human

“Naturalism was never the point.”
― Chris Holmlund, Female Trouble: A Queer Film Classic