1001Philosophers

Aristotle vs Immanuel Kant on Nature

Aristotle treats nature as a system of internally directed substances, each with its own form and characteristic activity, and natural inquiry as the discovery of these intrinsic principles. Kant treats nature as the totality of appearances under universal laws supplied by the categories of the understanding, and natural science as the systematic ordering of experience under these conditions. The Aristotelian philosopher finds purposes immanent in nature; the Kantian one finds lawfulness imposed on nature by the conditions of any possible experience.

About this topic

Philosophy's reflection on nature ranges from Greek inquiries into the principles of physical change to contemporary debates about the human relation to the non-human world. Ancient and medieval philosophers asked what nature is in itself and whether it has purposes; early modern thinkers reconceived it as the law-governed object of experimental science; Romantic and post-Romantic philosophers reacted by recovering nature as the site of meaning and value. The quotes below span all of these moments.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Aristotle vs Immanuel Kant comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the Nature quotes hub.

Representative quotes on nature

Aristotle on nature

  • “All men by nature desire to know.”

    Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10

  • “Nature does not do anything in vain .”

    Wikiquote

  • “The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be.”

    On the Heavens Book I, pg. 1 ( 350 BCE )

  • Attributed to Aristotle:

    “Man is by nature a political animal.”

  • Attributed to Aristotle:

    “Nature does nothing in vain.”

Immanuel Kant on nature

  • “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

    Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

  • “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

    Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6. | Variant translations: Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built. | From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned. | Never a straight thing was made from the crooked timber of man.

  • “Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.”

    A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken , p. 1017

  • “Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.”

    Immanuel Kant , Kant's Critique of Judgment (1892) Tr. J.H. Bernard

  • Attributed to Immanuel Kant:

    “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.”

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