Nature, Man and Woman by Alan Watts: A Complete Review

Book Overview and Historical Context

When Alan Watts published Nature, Man and Woman in 1958, the word "ecology" had barely entered public discourse, the sexual revolution was still years away, and Eastern philosophy was an exotic curiosity for most Western readers. What he wrote in those circumstances was, by any measure, ahead of its time.

The book grew directly from Watts' earlier work on Zen Buddhism and his conviction that Western civilization had made a fundamental error about the nature of reality. In The Way of Zen (1957), he had examined how Zen practice dissolves the illusion of the isolated self. In Nature, Man and Woman, he extended that investigation outward into the relationship between the human being and the living world.

Watts himself considered it among his finest achievements. In his autobiography In My Own Way (1972), he described it as one of the best-written of all his books, noting with some frustration that it had received less attention than his more commercially successful works. Critics who have read it carefully tend to agree with his self-assessment. The philosopher David Loy has called the book a "quietly radical document" that anticipated the deep ecology movement by nearly two decades.

The book is structured around a fundamental contrast: the Western worldview, shaped by Christianity and Cartesian philosophy, that sets humanity over against nature, and the Eastern worldview, exemplified primarily by Chinese Taoism, that sees humanity as one expression of nature's continuous self-unfolding. Watts does not simply catalogue these differences. He uses them as a diagnostic instrument, asking what has gone wrong in Western civilization and what a genuine healing might look like.

The cover image of the Vintage edition captures something of the book's spirit: a suggestion of the natural world as something intimate, enveloping, and alive rather than a backdrop against which human drama is staged. It is available in paperback (ISBN 9780679732334) and as an audiobook narrated by Jeremy Stockwell.

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The Problem of Western Dualism

Watts opens the book by tracing the roots of what he calls the "Western predicament." The predicament is not poverty, war, or technological dysfunction, these are symptoms. The disease, he argues, is a set of assumptions about reality so deeply embedded in Western thought that most people never recognize them as assumptions at all.

The first assumption: that the human being is a stranger in the natural world. In the dominant strand of Western theology, nature is a fallen realm from which the soul must escape. The body is either a prison (as in Neoplatonism) or an unruly animal that reason must control (as in Cartesian dualism). Either way, the human being's authentic home is not here, not in the flesh and the soil and the season's turning, but somewhere above and beyond the natural order.

The second assumption, which follows from the first: that nature exists to be used. If the human soul is fundamentally different from and superior to the rest of creation, then the rest of creation is raw material. This attitude, Watts argues, is not incidental to Western civilization but structural. It is baked into the philosophical and theological foundations laid in Greece and crystallized in the Christian tradition.

He is careful not to be simply anti-Christian. He acknowledges the mystical streams within Christianity, particularly the Rhineland mystics like Meister Eckhart and the Celtic tradition, that speak of nature as a continuous theophany, an ongoing revelation of the divine. But he argues that these voices were always marginal, consistently suppressed or qualified by the dominant tradition's insistence on the transcendence and separation of God from the created order.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whom Watts cites approvingly, called this the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness", treating an abstraction (the concept of a self separate from its environment) as if it were the concrete reality. For Watts, this fallacy is not merely an academic error but the source of enormous suffering: ecological destruction, the suppression of the body, the peculiar Western anxiety of being adrift in an alien universe.

The Taoist Vision of Nature

Against the Western predicament, Watts sets the Taoist vision. The Tao (roughly translated as "the Way" or "the Course") is the name given in classical Chinese thought to the continuous, self-generating movement of all things. It is not a god who created the world from outside; it is the world's own tendency to happen.

Watts draws extensively on the Tao Te Ching attributed to Laozi and the Chuang Tzu, the great Taoist classic of paradox and humor. In both texts, the central teaching is that the attempt to force, control, or manage the natural order produces exactly the disruption and disorder one is trying to prevent. The Taoist sage does not conquer nature but learns to move with it, like a practiced swimmer who uses the water's own motion rather than fighting against it.

The key Taoist concept here is wu wei, often translated as "non-action" or "effortless action." Watts is careful to explain that wu wei does not mean passivity or paralysis. It means acting in harmony with the natural tendency of a situation rather than imposing a predetermined agenda upon it. The skilled craftsman who finds the grain of the wood, the physician who supports the body's own healing tendencies rather than overwhelming them with intervention, the administrator who knows when to step back and when to act, all these embody wu wei.

What distinguishes the Taoist from the Western view, Watts argues, is not a different list of rules about how to treat nature. It is a fundamentally different perception of what the human being is. In Taoism, the human being is not a soul visiting a foreign country called the natural world. The human being is what nature does when it arrives at a certain degree of complexity and self-awareness. We are not observers of the Tao; we are expressions of it.

Body, Spirit, and the Redemption of Flesh

One of the book's most original contributions is its treatment of the body. Western thought, even in its most sophisticated forms, has tended to treat the body as either a problem to be solved or an instrument to be used. In Platonic philosophy, the body is the tomb of the soul. In mainstream Christian theology, the flesh is weak and prone to sin. In secular rationalism, the body is a biological machine that the mind must operate and maintain.

Watts challenges each of these positions. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition (particularly Merleau-Ponty, though he does not always name his sources), he argues that the body is not an instrument of consciousness but its medium. We do not have bodies; we are bodies. The experience of thinking, feeling, and perceiving is not something that happens to the body from the outside but something that the body itself does.

This has practical implications. The chronic tension that many people carry in their muscles, the shallow breathing, the difficulty sitting still, these are not merely physical problems. They are expressions of a philosophical stance: the refusal to trust the body, to let it be what it naturally is. The Taoist practice of relaxed, natural breathing is not just a health technique. It is a small philosophical revolution practiced in the flesh.

Watts also engages with the Christian tradition here in a more nuanced way than his critics sometimes acknowledge. He finds in certain strands of Christian mysticism, particularly in Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditation and in Francis of Assisi's hymn to Brother Sun and Sister Moon, an affirmation of the body and the natural world that runs counter to the dominant tradition's asceticism. These voices, he argues, represent a suppressed Christianity that has more in common with Taoist and Buddhist sensibilities than with mainstream Western theology.

Sexuality as Sacred Expression

No aspect of Nature, Man and Woman was more controversial at the time of its publication, or remains more significant, than its treatment of sexuality. Western civilization, Watts argues, has created a uniquely tortured relationship with sexual experience by loading it simultaneously with shame (it is sinful) and with impossible expectations (it must express romantic love, produce children, constitute a sacrament of commitment). The result is a generalized sexual neurosis in which people are neither free to enjoy sexuality spontaneously nor able to integrate it with the rest of their lives.

Watts traces the root of this problem to the same source as the ecological crisis: the assumption of separation. When the body is divided from the spirit, and the natural is divided from the sacred, sexuality becomes either purely animal (and therefore suspicious) or purely reproductive (and therefore instrumental). The middle path, sexuality as a form of mutual recognition and shared consciousness, becomes nearly impossible to sustain.

Against this, Watts brings two Eastern traditions to bear. The first is Taoist sexual philosophy, particularly from texts like the I Ching and the classical Chinese literature on the union of yin and yang. In this tradition, sexual union is not merely a biological event but a model of all relationships between complementary principles. The interaction of male and female is a microcosm of the interaction of heaven and earth, active and receptive, form and emptiness.

The second is the Tantric tradition of India, where sexuality is not sublimated or transcended but used as a vehicle for expanded awareness. Watts is not advocating Tantric ritual practice specifically; he is making a more general point that the body's natural capacities, including sexual energy, are not enemies of consciousness but can become its allies when approached without the overlay of shame, compulsion, or merely mechanical gratification.

It is worth noting what Watts does not say here. He is not arguing for promiscuity or against committed relationships. He is arguing that the quality of awareness one brings to sexual experience matters at least as much as its social form. Two people in a long-term committed relationship who bring genuine presence and mutual recognition to their sexuality are, in his view, practicing something closer to what the Taoist and Tantric traditions point toward than individuals who engage in numerous encounters governed by anxiety, performance, or dissociation.

The Ecological Vision Before Its Time

Published six years before the appearance of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which is often credited with launching the modern environmental movement, Nature, Man and Woman offers a philosophical diagnosis of the ecological crisis that Carson's scientific account did not attempt.

Carson documented what was happening to the natural world: pesticides accumulating in food chains, populations of birds collapsing, ecosystems becoming progressively simplified and fragile. Watts asked a prior question: why are we doing this? What kind of civilization produces people who treat the living world as a waste disposal site and a resource mine simultaneously?

His answer: a civilization that does not experience itself as part of nature. When people genuinely feel that they belong to the living world, not as a sentimental preference but as a biological and philosophical reality, exploitation of that world feels like self-destruction, because it is. When people feel themselves fundamentally separate from nature, managers or users of a resource, the psychological barriers to exploitation dissolve.

This argument was later developed with greater philosophical precision by deep ecology thinkers like Arne Naess, who coined the term "biospheric egalitarianism" to describe the view that all living beings have equal intrinsic value. Watts would not have used this language, but the insight is continuous with his. What he added that Naess sometimes did not was the psychological dimension: the reconnection with nature requires not just intellectual assent to ecological principles but a felt, embodied shift in one's sense of self.

Contemporary eco-psychologists like Theodore Roszak and Joanna Macy have pursued this line of inquiry explicitly, developing therapeutic practices aimed at what Roszak called "ecological ego", a sense of self that includes one's relationship with the living world. Both have acknowledged Watts as a predecessor.

East and West: A Comparative Reading

One of the intellectually satisfying aspects of Nature, Man and Woman is the precision of Watts' comparative work. He does not simply contrast "Eastern" and "Western" views in the vague way that much popular spirituality does. He reads specific texts, engages specific philosophers, and identifies specific moments of convergence and divergence.

His treatment of the Christian mystical tradition is particularly valuable. Watts spent years as an Anglican priest and had a thorough knowledge of Christian theology. When he draws on Meister Eckhart's concept of Gelassenheit (letting-go or releasement) or on the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, he is not cherry-picking convenient quotations but identifying genuine continuities between Christian contemplative experience and Taoist insight.

He is equally careful in his treatment of Taoism. He distinguishes between the classical Taoism of the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu and the later religious Taoism that developed elaborate pantheons and ritual practices. It is primarily the classical philosophical tradition that he draws on, though he acknowledges the folk Taoist practices of nature cultivation that developed from it.

The scholar of comparative religion Huston Smith, a contemporary of Watts and a rigorous academic where Watts was a gifted popularizer, largely agreed with Watts' characterization of the Eastern traditions. In The World's Religions (1958, the same year as Nature, Man and Woman), Smith identified the Taoist concept of non-interference with nature's processes as one of the key points of divergence between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.

Where scholars have sometimes questioned Watts is in his characterization of the Western tradition as uniformly dualistic. The historian of science and nature-philosophy David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), argues that Western alienation from nature is better explained by the effects of alphabetic writing on human perception than by theology alone. This is a complementary rather than contradictory thesis, Abram and Watts are identifying different layers of the same problem.

Why This Book Matters Now

More than six decades after its publication, Nature, Man and Woman reads less like a historical artifact and more like a document addressed to the present moment. The problems Watts diagnosed have, if anything, intensified. The ecological crisis that he saw in embryo has matured into a planetary emergency. The sexual neurosis he described has been simultaneously amplified by pornography and partially addressed by movements of body-positive thought. The philosophical problem at the root of both, the conviction that the self is an isolated entity in a world of alien objects, remains as pervasive as ever.

The book's continuing relevance also lies in what it does not do. It does not offer a ten-step program or a new ideology. It does not ask readers to become Taoists or to abandon their cultural heritage. It asks something more demanding and more modest: to look carefully at the assumptions one has inherited about what a human being is and where it stands in relation to the rest of life, and to be willing to consider that those assumptions might be mistaken.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), probably the most influential work of ecological philosophy published since Watts, approaches the same problems from a different direction, through Indigenous botanical knowledge rather than Asian philosophy, and arrives at strikingly similar conclusions. When Kimmerer argues that the greatest gift of Indigenous ecological thought is not any particular practice but a different perception of kinship with the living world, she is making an argument Watts would have recognized immediately.

For the spiritual practitioner, the book offers something specific: a philosophical grounding for practices that might otherwise seem merely therapeutic or merely aesthetic. Mindfulness, somatic practices, and nature-connection work are not luxuries or remedies for personal stress. They are, when understood in the light of what Watts is arguing, acts of philosophical resistance against the dominant culture's self-destructive perception of separation.

The Hermetic tradition, to which Thalira is dedicated, has always maintained the principle of correspondence: "As above, so below; as within, so without." This principle implies exactly the kind of participatory relationship with the natural world that Watts describes. The alchemist does not merely use nature's materials; the alchemist works in harmony with their inner tendencies and logics. The Hermetic physician does not fight the body but reads its symptoms as communications from a living system seeking its own balance. In these ways, the Hermetic vision and the Taoist vision that Watts articulates are not merely compatible but continuous.

If you have read Watts' The Way of Zen or The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are and felt that his argument needed to be extended into the domain of ecology and embodied life, Nature, Man and Woman is exactly that extension. It is, as Watts believed, among his most carefully thought-out works, and it rewards the care one brings to reading it.