Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on "Nature"

One of the questions that Raymond Williams, in his essay “Ideas of Nature,” kept coming back to was whether or not humans have been included in the definition of the term “nature,” as it has been defined throughout history. He answers that nature eventually had to be separated from man, but I refer to Williams’ question because as I read the selections from Edmund Burke’s Reflections and the responses to it from Thomas Paine, I noticed how the texts contain an ambivalent understanding of the term nature, and how Williams’ question is very much relevant to both. Burke has in mind a hierarchical view of nature, one that should protect the nobility from relinquishing their right to rule. Paine offers a more democratic, so to speak, definition of nature, yet Paine’s idea of the term shares common principles with Burke’s.

What interested me about Burke’s use of the term nature is the variety of attributes he designates it with. Speaking of England’s monarchy and the established order of its constitution, he refers to this “entailed inheritance” as “the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it” (LABL 115). The operative word “or” can arguably posit two different interpretations of the word nature. One would be that this entailed inheritance is the result of a long tradition of critical thinking about our place in society, which suggests we are separated from nature. The other interpretation, and one that Burke identifies with, relies on us being included and following the pattern of the natural world. The nobility can and should rule because that is the course nature takes, according to Burke. In this sense, the natural world seems to be void of any agency. Whatever wisdom nature contains, Burke doesn’t seem to suggest there is a mind with volition behind it.

In fact, he claims nature acts out of an “unerring instinct, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” (LABL 116). Our reason [whether nature bestowed us with reason Burke does not specify] is subordinate to the natural world. The implications are that instinct—which is an impulsive, spontaneous response—in the natural world, defeats our mediated, reflective, conscious decisions. But not only does nature trump our reason, it, according to Burke, also “teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended,” which seems to me to account only for the nobility (LABL 116). This suggests, once again, a hierarchal principle that Burke believes can be traced back to history, following the course of nature. He admits, “each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of society, linking the lower with the higher natures…according to a fixed compact which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place” (LABL 117).

Much like Burke’s Reflections rely on a principle of analogy that compares society to the natural world, Thomas Paine’s selections from The Rights of Man also suggests “the laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle” (LABL 133). While Paine’s text seeks to disassociate with Burke’s hierarchical view of nature, it nonetheless shares with Burke an idea of commonality. Paine says “all men are born equal and with equal natural rights, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward” (LABL 136). Paine, like Burke, believes there is an essence about human beings that remains constant, although outward appearances of their mortal bodies decay and change. While Burke attributes that essence to the workings of nature alone, Paine suggests that nature has a created origin. For Burke, the nobility inherits the right to rule, but in Paine’s case, every man shares that right, which suggests that man can break the supposedly fixed order of the natural world. Every human birth should be equaled to the divine creation at the beginning of the world, even though humans descend from one generation to the next. This view echoes Burke’s notion that regarding the constituent parts of the state, the monarchy follows the principles of “succession by common law” by calling it now “succession by the statue law” (LABL 114-15). In both cases, Burke’s and Paine’s, the means to inheritance has changed, but there is an essence through that inheritance that remains constant. Where Burke and Paine part ways is in the way they suggest our human nature depends on that inheritance. Burke’s ideas that the nobility’s human nature is superior is contrasted with Paine’s views about our human nature is essentially the same. Comparing Burke and Paine made me reflect on the way they both traced an inheritance, similar yet different in some ways, to a long, antiquated past. Burke and Paine admit that nature hands down certain rights to man. Paine ascribes the origin of nature to a divine mind, but Burke seems to duck the question about nature’s origin altogether. The difference between the two implies how one defines human nature, and whether, like Williams asks, we share our ontology with the natural world.