World, Nature, Physis

An addendum to an earlier post on Rosenstock-Huessy's essay, "The Metabolism of Science."

Though he sees world, nature, and physis as identical in some ways, he also distinguishes them. We have different experiences of the external world, and there are summarized in the Anglo-Saxon "world," the Latin "nature," and the Greek "physis" (he notes, intriguingly, that this list mimics the order of the inscription on Jesus' cross - vernacular [Hebrew], Latin, and Greek).

World is the universe experienced as threat. World chases us, assaults us, tries to kill us. World is the universe before we have any understanding of it, or any control over it. Physis, by contrast, is the world subdued and understood. Physis is what engineers and scientists produce out of world. To move from World to Physis, we need to pass through the stage of Nature, where the universe presents itself to us as a task, but an unfinished one. Nature is not a threat, but it is also not explained and subdued yet (romantic poets don't rhapsodize on "world" or "physis," but on "nature").

Faith is required to move from world to nature. Here faith means "turning around" to confront the world that pursues us, and facing it down. This "turn-around" is accomplished, Rosenstock-Huessy says, in prayer and faith, and he cites the Roman prayer to Mors/Mars as an illustration - the prayer calls on Mors to turn from his assault on Rome, stand at the threshold of the city, turn to the enemies of Rome and fight them as Mars, the Roman god of war. In prayer, we are calling on God (or what Rosenstock-Huessy calls "gods") to turn around and come to our aid, to assist us as we confront the World and seek to subdue it to Physis. ("Gods" here means sex, war, money, etc. These are threatening, addicting, enslaving powers until we confront them in faith, and call on them to turn and fight for us.)

Science, then, is based on religion, on a turning-about in faith, on prayer. Hence both the scientific disdain of religion, and the religious disdain of science, are foolish.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 01:14 PM

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