ABSTRACT
Almost always, though, some great opposition is at stake and the use of the term is meant to distinguish and contrast. In the everyday sense, the contrast is between the familiar, what happens for the most part, what is expectable and normal, and what is uniquely unexpected, out of the ordinary, strange, “the unnatural.” In early philosophical uses, the important contrasts are between “by nature” and “by art,” between physis and techne, and between nature and custom, physis and nomos. It is with Lucretius, and De rerum natura, that what would eventually become the great issue in modernity first appeared with clarity, even if in an undeveloped form: the claim that everything is natural, and natural in pretty much the same sense, and so all bound by the “bond of nature” (foedus naturae), including the unusual, the freakish, and even the instituting of, and changes in, human customs and laws. And it is quite important that this most comprehensive appeal should be so immediately associated with the idea of being bound, since this sets out the contrast with our common sense experience quite well-that we do not seem to ourselves bound, but to be able to evaluate and settle on claims about the empirical world and to initiate action as we deem best, not in the way that bees build hives or bloodhounds sniff out trails or water flows downhill.
