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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2016

Nature and Supplementation in Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse

Résumé

Nature loves to hide." Heraclitus's enigmatic aphorism, as Pierre Hadot reminds us, probably signifies that what is born ("nature") tends to disappear ("to hide") or to die (Hadot 2004: 30). From the beginning of the Christian era, however, Heraclitus's sentence was interpreted in a vastly different way. It was an allusion to the secrets of a nature that likes to shroud itself in mystery, and that men can only represent beneath a veil that calls for an unveiling. In the face of the secrets of nature, Hadot distinguishes two fundamental attitudes in western thought: the first, which he calls Promethean, appears in Antiquity. It encourages resorting to ruse, technology, and to a form of violence to seize nature's secrets from it and elucidate its mysteries. Encouraged by the Christian tradition, this attitude blossoms thanks to Francis Bacon and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, which aims to render man "the master and possessor of nature," as per Descartes's famous sentence derived from Genesis. The second attitude, which Hardot defines as Orphic, imagines, on the contrary, a state of immersion in nature leading to a kind of knowledge that is empathetic or merely contemplative, and that, respecting its veil, refrains from any violence against nature-the natural order of things being beyond our comprehension.

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hal-03151823 , version 1 (25-02-2021)

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Christophe Martin. Nature and Supplementation in Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau between Nature and Culture : Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 2016, pp.153-165, 2016, 978-3110450750. ⟨10.1515/9783110457186⟩. ⟨hal-03151823⟩
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