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Naturalism: Nature
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Naturalism is a word with as many phases of meaning as pacifism or patriotism, and about it rages nearly as fierce a conflict. When Zola issued his well-known pronunciamento that Naturalistic art was Nature seen through a temperament, he stressed the word "Nature." Nature and Nature only must be the subject of art: to face Nature frankly and openly, to present her dulnesses and stupidities and shames with scrupulous impartiality must be the aim of the artist. Now modern English criticism has preferred to call such full-length and unflattering portraiture of Dame Nature, even the emphasis upon her wry neck, bow legs, and squint.....
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Although Naturalism is a product of the nineteenth century, its spiritual father, in modern history, was Shakespeare. The premise that man does not possess volition, that his destiny is determined by an innate "tragic flaw," is fundamental in Shakespeare's work. But, granted this false premise, his approach is metaphysical, not journalistic. His characters are not drawn from "real life," they are not copies of observed concretes nor statistical averages: they are grand-scale abstractions of the character traits which a determinist would regard as inherent in human nature: ambition, power-lust, jealousy, greed, etc.
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Naturalism implies a unity and lawfulness in nature, a condition in which nature's reality can be objectively understood, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be useless and uncertain. If supernaturalism were true, miracles would allow unique, non-repeating, and non-controllable events to cause natural effects that would be incomprehensible using empirical methods of investigation. Omnipotent deities could act arbitrarily and irrationally without compunction and violate natural laws for no humanly-comprehensible reason. No acceptable criteria exist or can exist for establishing the validity of supernatural events, so any example of supernaturalism is meaningless as a form of knowledge. Supernaturalism, therefore, makes a mockery of skepticism, since in a supernatural world everything imaginable is possible. If everything imaginable is possible, then skepticism is unnecessary and meaningless.
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Naturalism applies both to scientific ideas and principles, such as instinct and Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to fiction. Authors in this movement wrote stories in which the characters behave in accordance with the impulses and drives of animals in nature. The tone is generally objective and distant, like that of a botanist or biologist taking notes or preparing a treatise. Naturalist writers believe that truth is found in nature, and because nature operates within consistent principles, patterns, and rules, truth is consistent.
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From the fundamental principles of Naturalism are derived some important consequences in æsthetical, political, and ethical sciences. In æsthetics Naturalism rests on the assumption that art must imitate nature without any idealization, and without any regard for the laws of morality. Social and political Naturalism teaches that "the best interests of public society and civil progress require that in the constitution and government of human society no more attention should be given to religion than if there were no religion at all, or at least that no distinction should be made between true and false religion" ( Pius IX, Encycl., "Quanta cura", 8 Dec., 1864). Leo XIII lays it down that "the integral profession of the Catholic Faith is in no way consistent with naturalistic and rationalistic opinions, the sum and the substance of which is to do away altogether with Christian institutions, and; disregarding the rights of God, to attribute to man the supreme authority in society " (Encycl., "Immortale Dei", 1 Nov., 1885). Moreover, like individual organisms, social organisms obey fatal laws of development; all events are the necessary results of complex antecedents, and the task of the historian is to record them and to trace the laws of their sequences, which are as strict as those of sequences in the physical world.
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Naturalism in art refers to the depiction of realistic objects in a natural setting. The Realism movement of the 19th century advocated naturalism in reaction to the stylized and idealized depictions of subjects in Romanticism, but many painters have adopted a similar approach over the centuries. One example of Naturalism is the artwork of American artist William Bliss Baker, whose landscape paintings are considered some of the best examples of the naturalist movement. An important part of the naturalist movement was its Darwinian perspective of life and its view of the futility of man up against the forces of nature.
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