Starting with Galileo Galilei’s Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, the vision of nature as an objective order, structured around efficient causes, began spreading across the intellectuals of the time. Among the philosophers of this century, the two most important ones are: Giordano Bruno and Francesco Bacone. Bruno, having lived in the Renaissance Naturalism period, believed that nature is structured like a living organism with its own soul: the thesis of the biocentric model. For Bacone, instead, nature is nothing but a mean to help humanity, treating it from an objective point of view: the thesis of the antropocentric model, with the man symbolically put at the centre of the Universe as the first product of God, with everything else seen as inferior. The antopocentric model reminds us of meccanicism, used by modern science, but also of Bacone’s thought “knowledge is power”: understanding nature’s mechanism allows us to dominate and use it whenever we want, at our conditions. What bonds together Bacone and Bruno’s thoughts is the centrality of the theme of “Nature’s problem” (in Greek, ‘phisis’): they were absolutely convinced that, beyond what appears to our eyes, there is a unique and eternal reality, called ‘arché’, or principle. From this conception, pantheism and pampsichism arose. Pantheists believed that God reveals his presence in every natural element, while pampsychists thought that every element of nature had a soul. Even Virgil in the Augustan age, inspired by Theocritus, took up the theme of nature: he sets his stories in “Arcadia”, the shepherds’locus amoenus, full of metaphorical meanings; a place of shelter, a place where you can live and sing about love; a civilised society that was opposed to barbarism; a “topos” later revived by Boccaccio, Petrarca and Dante, and even by Rousseau in his “Myth of the Noble Savage”. During the Romantic period, whose one of the main characteristics, the strive to find a place free from rules, was a conception that came from Rosseau’s mind, poetry became the most vital form of literary expression. The Romantic poetry heavily influenced a change in the conception of the European sensibility. Intellectually speaking, the Romantic spirit was totally against Enlightenment; politically, it was influenced by the American and French revolution; emotionally, it affirmed the individual experience. The last two decades of the 18th century are considered as Pre-Romantic, as the sensibility of the masterpieces of Richardson and Sterne influenced many of the classical poets, such as Thomas Grey. Many concepts change, just like nature’s one, as it’s not seen anymore as a combination of divine rules, but as a being with its own soul and mind. The exaltation of this new sensibility founded the basis for the new estetic theory, built on individual conscience instead of imitating nature’s rules or classical ones. Hume negated the experience, as Locke had already done, by saying that beauty doesn’t reside in things, but in the mind of who’s watching, and it’s different from person, to person. So how can something that has existed for thousands of years be so mainstream even in the present day? The most well-known recent case that revolves around nature and the respect we should give it has to do with Coronavirus, more commonly known as Covid, the virus that began spreading in Wuhan, one of China’s largest cities, in late 2019: the various mutations of the virus and the different pandemic waves forced us to stay at home, and nature took the opportunity to show humanity how much harm we cause to our Earth: in the span of a few months, many animals were spotted closer than ever to cities, trees saw a huge blooming; we witnessed, for the first time in hundreds of years, how the Earth should really look like. We, to the eyes of our planet, are only disturbers of its beauty and harmony, and we should respect a force that is so much bigger than us, even bigger than what our minds can conceive. We humans, as part of the Earth’s ecosystem, should care about the healthiness of our planet: we shall do this not only to preserve the other forms of life, but to give a chance too to the generations yet to come, too. For every occasion where we cause harm to our planet, we are also harming our present generation and the future ones. We should all strive to pursue a more ecological lifestyle, beginning with the recycling of the waste that we produce, that could be used to create objects that we use in our everyday life; on a larger scale, industries should stop using polluting fuels such as coal, instead heavily investing into renewable sources that are unlimited and, in many ways, cheaper. Awareness about the precarious conditions of the Earth should be spread among all with peaceful manifestations and publicity. As cited in the Bible, the Earth is: “a gift of God to the humans, that should be protected and preserved for future generations”: this planet was gifted to us by God, and God told us to preserve it, as the only protectors of all life forms.
Written by: Federica Balestrieri, Giovanni de Gennaro, Manuel Miloro, Giovanna Narciso, Antonio de Sanctis