Abstract

Naturalism is a term that stands for a family of positions that endorse the general idea of being true to, or guided by, “nature”, an idea as old as Western thought itself (e.g. Aristotle is often called a naturalist) and as various and open-ended as interpretations of “nature”. Since the rise of the modern scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, nature has increasingly come to be identified with the-worldas-studied-by-the-sciences. Consequently, naturalism has come to mean a set of positions defined in terms of the scientific image of nature or the methods of scientific inquiry. In this brief article I shall focus upon explicating three versions of scientific naturalism: 1) naturalism in the arts especially literature; 2) philosophical naturalism; and 3) naturalism in the social sciences. These different naturalisms correspond to different ways of appealing to science, whether it be adopting a scientific stance towards human and social life, or a broadly empirical approach to inquiry in general, or a scientific worldview. Naturalism in field of the arts refers to art that depicts everyday subjects in a ‘realistic’ manner, one free from stylisation, idealization or academic convention. Although the term has been used to describe a style of painting since the late seventeenth century (e.g. Caravaggio’s), it only became an important term of art criticism in the nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet being one of the leading examples. Naturalism as a literary category was first applied to a genre of French fiction exemplified by Emile Zola, which builds on the anti-romantic ‘realist’ fiction of Gustav Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, writers who deliberately adopt a scientific – that is, detached and objective -- approach to human life. The vision of the human depicted in naturalist literature owes much to a picture of the world suggested by Darwin’s theory of evolution: a purposeless, Godless world of competitive striving where the notion of free will is treated with suspicion..