Abstract

When Samuel Johnson commended Shakespeare's dramas on the basis of their "just representations of general nature," he invoked in the term "nature" a philosophical interpretive tradition that was both authoritative and controversial. Johnson's concept of nature is a complex metaphysical construction that derives from the medieval Schoolmen's interpretation of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation in terms of concepts drawn from such classical sources as Platonic idealism and Aristotelian teleology. Johnson's commitment to a metaphysically-defined "nature" as manifested in his major works is the basis of his critical response to the eighteenth-century trend toward philosophical reductionism, a trend evident in theology, moral theory, natural philosophy, and aesthetics. Defending a rational moral realism against the moral conventionalism of Hume and others, Johnson founds the explanation of his moral theory on the presumption that value inheres in nature by virtue of its divine creation and that moral principles define action that is consistent with that value. Criticizing the philosophical materialism implicit in current developments in natural philosophy, Johnson endorses the scientific investigation of a nature defined teleologically in relation to its contribution to the progress and improvement of humanity, a definition, ultimately theological, that aligns Johnson with such giants of Early Modern science as Newton and Boyle. Against the narrow critical principles of some Neoclassical critics, Johnson commends drama and literature on the basis of their "just representations of general nature," representations which, in view of the metaphysical constitution of their object, demand in the artist who can realize them both extraordinary insight into the nature of reality and imaginative ingenuity in crafting images that suggest and evoke it. "Nature," in sum, names Johnson's theoretical context within which he accounts for both the permanent and universal foundations of reality that revelation describes and intuition detects, and also for the shifting array of complicated appearances that nature presents to human experience