Ever since the Renaissance, the notion of humanity steadily came to acquire the status of an external, disentangled and at times even opposing category to the notion of ‘natura’. At the core of this discursive tendency there emerged a ‘segregative’ mode of thinking about the world, one which purported, at the same time as it reproduced, a ‘broken’ or ‘discontinuous’ view between the natural and human world, as well as between the constituent fields comprising each of those worlds respectively. Nevertheless, this way of thinking about the world came as a bold and stark break from the Classical view of nature and human life, as this is presented in the theories of Plato and Aristotle, which regarded the physical aspect and constitution of the world on the one hand, and human characteristics and experiences on the other, as aligned into one ontological structure, given and summarised by the term ‘physis’. The aim of this paper is to examine the differences between the Classical and modern views of the relationship between nature and human nature, as those are encapsulated under the terms ‘natura’ and ‘physis’ respectively, in order to demonstrate the very divergent ontological and epistemological implications and effects of the two discursive moments. Secondly, the paper relates the discussion of ‘physis’ and ‘natura’ to political theory, by showing how the exclusion of considerations of nature from modern political theory stems from, and still heavily depends heavily upon, the limited and misinformed conception of ‘natura’ which was developed in discourses of the Renaissance, and which continued in the form of a background conceptual understanding until our own times. Thirdly, the paper suggests a methodological apparatus for reconciling nature and its importance to human and political life, through examining how, with the use of certain elements of Aristotle’s physical theory, modern theories of Physics can be used in the interpretation, modelling and explanation of socio-political phenomena.
