Au Naturel: The 'Natural' in the 1960s, Harbin, Philosophy, Evolutionary Biology

The natural was a focus in the 1960s and 70s for so many people.

An estimated 2-10 million (out of about 235 million people in the U.S. - now there are about 300 million) returned to the land to set up communes and farm organically (Turner 2007). And a lot of organic farms are still around from that time.


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Harbin is significantly au naturel. Clothing-optionalness, which usually takes the form of nakedness in the pool area, is a key aspect of Harbin. For the founder of Harbin, body affirmation is central, - especially in this modern world which isn't that relaxed with natural clothing-optionalness.

Why does the tradition of clothing spread - which has ancient roots in many cultures - and which modernity spreads further?


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In philosophy, the natural is significant, but this is circumscribed by texts and modes of thinking which focus discourse in specific ways, rarely taking into account, for example, the evolutionary biology of other primates in thinking about thinking (or clothing-optionalness), especially vis-a-vis the natural. A key tradition vis-a-vis the 'natural' starts with Aristotles' Natural Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/), and develops to examine natural law. "Nature, according to Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and being at rest (Physics 2.1, 192b20-23)."


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A professor of mine in a "Plant Evolution" course at Reed College once encouraged us to think critically of the word natural, because it's very hard to define.


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The natural in modernity takes on many guises, but hippies, in particular, rejected much about modernity to shape something new vis-a-vis the natural.


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Evolutionary biology and the natural, and thought from this perspective, rewrites a lot of thinking in human history thus far.


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Tao-ist thinking offers a fascinating philosophy of the natural.


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Nearly all of the photos in these roughly 500 blog entries' titles have focused in some way on the natural, both in disjunct and congruent ways with the writing there.


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And in this blog, I continue to explore how to elicit naturally the neurophysiology of loving bliss ...














(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/09/au-naturel-natural-in-1960s-harbin.html - September 21, 2009)