Why Do We Love Nature?

Let us pose the question in the most straightforward way: why, when facing nature, does every human being experience wonder?

Yesterday evening, at sunset, small groups of people had gathered on the cliff. They were all looking in the same direction, towards the west, where the sun was sinking into the sea. They were a hugely diverse crowd: young lovers, families, solitary fishermen, sea enthusiasts, shopkeepers who had stepped out for a break. No one had convened that gathering. Yet there they were, side by side, their faces turned to the exact same point on the horizon, united for a few minutes by something that none of them owned, but which was happening to them all.

I begin here because that scene already contains everything I want to say. Nature gathers us. It takes irreconcilable differences and aligns them, for a single moment, in the same direction. But that "us" created by the sunset is a "we" that simply happens: nobody built it, nobody answers for it, and once the sun has set, everyone will return to their separate lives. The question of democracy — the question of demopraxy — arises precisely from this gap: what is required for a community gathered by nature to become a community that builds itself?

Science helps us understand why that gathering happens. We are beings predisposed to nature: for millennia, our survival depended on knowing how to read it, and we still bear the mark of that dependence — the biophilia hypothesis. Yet, when facing vastness, something more radical occurs. The sense of the self shrinks; researchers call this the small self, and they have shown that this shrinking does not isolate: it binds. A person who has just experienced wonder finds themselves more humble, more willing to cooperate, and better able to recognise the other. The mechanics are precise: when confronted with something that exceeds our frameworks, the mind is forced to update them; it is this need for accommodation that we call awe. The astonishing and the marvellous are, once again, the sublime — and within the sublime, the limen, the threshold, denotes precisely this: the urgent need to expand the perimeter of our presence, which has suddenly become too narrow. We feel too small for the world opening up before us, and within that disproportion, something in us leans out beyond its own boundary.

But why does it move us so deeply?

A few years ago, an established child psychiatrist from Brussels came to visit us. Her experience had led her to treat over ten thousand young people across more than forty years of practice. It was she, during a lunch at the Cittadellarte Cafe while we were planning the installation of a Third Paradise in the Flemish countryside, who illuminated with a flash of insight a part of my imagination that had long been stirring restlessly. She explained the Lacanian theory of the manque (lack) and the primal wound: the moment one becomes aware of one's "ontological" separation from the mother, which typically occurs around eighteen months of age, regardless of culture or era. That revelation was what I had been waiting for, and for which I had prepared through many other conversations and reflections.

For what that scholar defined with clinical precision, I had been pursuing for years through a different path. In the very first months of life, we do not distinguish our own self from our mother's: we are an undivided whole, a drop that does not yet know it is a drop. Then comes the separation — Margaret Mahler calls it individuation — and with it, a fracture that never closes again. Freud had already given it a beautiful name: the oceanic feeling, the nostalgia for an unlimited fusion that he connected, not by chance, to the very origin of religious feeling. Lacan called it manque, precisely: the lack that originates all desire. Ever since, we spend our entire lives longing to mend that tear. And wonder before nature is perhaps the oldest and most universal promise of mending this laceration: for a moment, facing the sunset, the drop feels like the sea again — or rather, the ocean.

There is a reflection that has accompanied me for a long time, which that Flemish conversation only served to confirm. It concerns the sacred. The Latin sacer is that which is set apart, separated — as Giorgio Agamben has forcefully reminded us. But if the sacred is the separated, then sensing something as sacred means perceiving within it the opposite promise: that of a reunion. We sense the sacred where we believe we can return to the primordial union we lost the very moment we became individuals.

I would like to pause on this word, reunite (to re-join), because it lies at the heart of this era of laceration and division. To reunite is the same gesture as uniting and gathering together. It is the re-ligare from which religions stem — binding again what was unbound, gathering what was scattered. And it is, at the same time, the One of Eastern philosophies: that undivided ground from which multiplicity arises and to which it aspires to return. West and East, through vastly different paths, give voice to the same desire: that separation should not have the final word. Nature, by offering us wonder, temporarily restores the tangible experience of that unity. The sunset on the cliff is, in this sense, a small sacred space: not because it tears us away from the world, but because it delivers us back to it as a shared home.

And here, the sacred becomes secular, material, immanent. One does not need an "elsewhere" to experience it. Franco Arminio, with his concept of the sacro minore (minor sacred), taught us to recognize the wonder nested — almost hidden — within everyday things: simple, humble, essential, authentic things. A deserted village, an old man sitting on a doorstep, the wind blowing between houses. The sacred does not only inhabit mountain peaks and starry skies; it also inhabits the minimal, the mundane, the near. It is a religiosity without gods, entirely directed toward the living. And this is already, in nuce, a democratic posture: because it treats every thing and every being as worthy of attention and care.

From this dual foundation — the wonder that decentres us, and the wound that makes us long for oneness — one is tempted to draw a conclusion that is as natural as it is dangerous: that community is our original state; that recognizing ourselves in one another is a return, rather than a conquest; that democracy, as the space for that recognition, ultimately rests upon a disposition already inscribed within us by nature. It is a seductive conclusion, and for that very reason we must look it squarely in the face, because history has shown us its cost.

The very same wonder that unites us has nourished its opposite with equal force. The sublime of the Romantics — the solitary figure standing before the vastness of the mountain, the thrill of the immense — was co-opted by European nationalisms and transformed into a liturgy of belonging. The myth of the land as a root, of blood and soil, took the purest emotion felt before a landscape and turned it into an engine of exclusion: this land is ours because we feel it is ours, and whoever does not feel it as we do does not belong here. The awe that draws a tribe around its own fire is, word for word, the exact same awe that erects walls against those beyond the fire. The intensity of a bond possesses, of itself, no moral limits: it binds those included among themselves with the same power that it directs against the excluded. This is the point we cannot bypass. Nature gives us the power of the bond. It does not give us its perimeter.

Elsewhere, I have called the study of how this bond is formed the politics of condensation. It is worth explaining, as it is a precise metaphor rather than mere ornament. In nature, vapor is dispersed: invisible, minute, scattered everywhere in the air. When conditions allow — a drop in temperature, a speck of dust around which to aggregate — that vapor condenses into droplets, the droplets become a cloud, and the cloud becomes rain. Condensation is the moment when the dispersed becomes one, when the invisible multitude takes shape and weight. The same happens among human beings: scattered individuals, each going their own way, condense into a "we" when something gathers them — a sunset, a bereavement, a celebration, a threat. But here lies the crux: condensation is a physical, spontaneous event. It produces density, not direction. The cloud forms by itself; it does not choose where it will rain. Thus, nature hands us the "we" and remains silent on everything else: silent on who that "we" includes, who it leaves out, and upon which land its water will fall. It gives us the drop that becomes rain. It does not tell us upon whom the rain ought to fall.

It is precisely within this silence of nature that the space for democracy opens up — and that space bears a name both ancient and new: it is the difference between the natural and the artificial. The disposition to form bonds is given to us freely, as a first paradise. But the just ordering of the bond — one that includes rather than excludes, that keeps the door open instead of walling it up — is something no nature produces on its own. It must be made. It must be constructed, and then painstakingly kept open, because its spontaneous tendency is to close back up. It is a work of art, an opera. And properly human work does not consist in denying the natural in the name of the artificial, nor in mourning the natural against the artificial, but in reuniting the two poles into a third that holds them together: the natural we receive and the artificial we add, reconstituted in the Third Paradise. This is the Formula of Creation: from the dynamic and balanced union of opposites, that which did not exist before is born.

I call artistic intelligence the faculty that performs this transition, and I would like to explain carefully what I mean, as it is a concept upon which much depends. Every living being reacts to stimuli automatically: it receives a bond just as the crowd at the sunset receives wonder — it happens to them, and they do not answer for it. We call an automaton anyone who remains at this stage, who undergoes their belongings as a received fate. Artistic intelligence is, first and foremost, a process of de-automatisation: the ability to suspend the automatic reaction, to observe it, to refrain from being acted upon by it, and instead to become its author.

The artist, in this broad sense, is not merely someone who paints pictures: it is anyone who takes raw material — even if that material is their own life, or their bond with others — and gives it a form that did not exist before. But there is a second step, and it is the decisive one for democracy. The author who becomes a co-author recognizes that everyone else beside them is doing the exact same thing: the other is also an author; the other is also giving shape. Therefore, they build with the other, not against them, nor in their place. The human being is an artistic animal precisely through this dual capacity: to de-automatise oneself and to co-author. They take the intensity gifted by nature and, instead of letting it settle into closed belonging, they work it until it becomes an extendable bond.

And now we arrive at the core, the point toward which everything else converges.

Those people on the cliff were a condensation. Nature had gathered them, but it had not made them a community. One becomes a community elsewhere, and in a very specific way: within a community of practice. I must explain what I mean with care, because everything is decided here. We are accustomed to thinking that individuals come first — already formed, already equipped with their own identity — and that only afterwards do they choose to relate to one another, like fully formed bricks brought together to build a wall. But that is not how things are, and experience knows this before theory does. None of us becomes ourselves alone. We become who we are within the relationships that traverse us: the language we speak was given to us, the gestures that move us were learned from others, even the way we desire and suffer bears the imprint of those who preceded us and those beside us. We are not individuals who subsequently enter into relationships; we are relationships that, through practice, become individuated.

A person's identity does not precede the community of practice: it is born within it. This is why the community of practice is foundational, not merely instrumental. It is not a place where we bring a pre-packaged identity to exercise it in company; it is the place where that identity comes into the world and is continually reborn, negotiating itself within the changing conditions of the situations it encounters. In essence, we make ourselves into persons and evolve as such by doing things together, changing and increasingly becoming who we decide to be and who we come to be.

Here matures the transition that demopraxy holds most dear: from automaton to author, and from author to co-author. The automaton undergoes the bond just as the crowd at sunset undergoes wonder: it happens to them, and they do not answer for it. The author takes it in hand and shapes it. The co-author takes the further, more difficult step — acknowledging that the other is also an author — and builds together with them. To be both drop and rain simultaneously: to safeguard one's singularity while belonging to the whole. This is the minimal formula of this citizenship, and it is the exact opposite both of the isolated individual and the indistinct mass.

And there is more, because this community of practice is not a utopia to be founded tomorrow: it already exists, and it already governs. Alongside the visible government of institutions operates another, silent one, which we continuously exercise within the fabric of our relationships, our consumption, our words, and our attention. It is the second government. It holds real power — it decides, directs, includes, excludes, and distributes recognition or indifference — yet for the most part, it ignores its own existence. And precisely because it ignores it, it remains automatic, irresponsible, and blind.

Consider the most mundane act imaginable: doing the grocery shopping. Carried out by automatons, it is a purely automatic ritual — I take from the shelf what price, habit, or advertising has already chosen for me. In doing so, I unwittingly feed a system that commodifies, disunites, desecrates, and plunders every thing and every life, reducing the living to merchandise and bonds to transactions.

However, that exact same gesture, once de-automatised, turns into its opposite. Every purchase becomes a silent vote: by choosing one product over another, I decide which supply chains survive, which labor is fairly compensated, which land is cultivated with care, and which is exploited. I have elected no one, yet I am governing a piece of the world. Thus, shopping ceases to be consumption and becomes a tool of personification and relationship — even a political stance: a minimal, minor form of activism operating at the very heart of economicism's automatising system. It is the second government discovering itself as a government — and, through the market's desecration, recognizing by contrast that which it would prefer to keep sacred once again: that is to say, united.

In this regard, I would like to share the story of an event that took place right here where I am now, where this cliff stands upon which people gather at sunset: the village of Corniglia, in the Cinque Terre, where Pistoletto lived with his family in the 1970s and organized collective artistic activities. One of these involved gathering people in front of the sea to applaud it. It was a way of directing that wonder — the awe we spoke of — toward a dimension of awareness and sharing. A way to understand that we can rain together: distinct, unique drops forming a great common action in which to gather, find oneself, and recognize one another.

The work of demopraxy is precisely this: bringing the second government to consciousness. Making authorial what is automatic, responsible what is unconscious, and a deliberate work (opera) of what was previously merely an occurrence. Turning that crowd gathered by the sunset into a people who know they are one, and who decide how to be one.

There remains a symmetry I would like to leave with the reader by way of farewell, for it is no mere ornament, but the closing of the circle. Thought itself, when it exceeds our frameworks, makes us experience the same shrinking as the starry sky: it reveals us to be small before that which we did not understand, and in that very gesture, it expands us, forcing us to accommodate our categories to make room for it. Good philosophy produces the small self of a mountain peak. It is, in itself, a form of wonder.

Thus, democracy through demopraxy — understood as the practice of reuniting without fencing off, of uniting without excluding — is not merely sparked by the awe nature gifts us: it is its complete and conscious form. It is the way in which the artistic animal gathers the intensity given to them for free and crafts it into a work that includes, rather than repels and divides.

Let us return, in closing, to the cliff. Those diverse people, their faces turned to the west, were each a drop, gathered without intentionality for the duration of a sunset. Nature had condensed them and collected them into a swift, ephemeral rain. To them — drops fallen almost without knowing it — a "we" happened, consuming itself in an unconscious performance, an undeclared ritual.

Whether this ephemeral "we" will become a community capable of answering for itself, deciding how to fall as water — how to happen, therefore, in the encounter with others — will not be decided by nature. That is our work. That is a demopratic work which, through the Statodellarte (State of the Art / State of Art), leads artistic, connective, and collective intelligence to give shape and meaning to our being in the world: the moral law within us, the starry sky above us, drops and rain at the very same time.