Nature loves to hide

Abstract

Spanish translation of Marc Richir’s article «La nature aime à se cacher», published in Kairos, n.° 26, 2005, pp. 77-97. In this text, Richir treats, at first time, about matter of nature (physis) as symbolic institution. Richir’s proposal roughly speaking lies in the consideration that in this symbolic institution there is a certain strange character, which belongs to physis. This strange belonging element to nature is encoded, in the ancient Greek age, through the ontology, and, in the Modernity, through the mathematical thinking. The question will be how the institution of nature is gave by the physical-mathematical codification, as a kind of metaphysics of the nature, which is thought by the physical science as naked by itself , without realizing that this codification leave strange elements behind. Richir shows that physics (and mathematics) try to discover the nature, its laws, and its more minimum measures, but it is always something hidden, because it institutes an understanding from human measures and devices, in which something of nature remains hidden. Richir’s consideration is about the signification of the nature, and the physical limits to take it. «The nature hides itself when it shows», therefore the physical limits are in question, and this is the philosophical work, as an epistemological matter. Richir concludes considering that nature is an open indefinite question, which is always to make.