What is nature?
Nature is everything that exists beyond (or prior to) human
control. By human control, I mean
conscious thought—our designs, to borrow an outdated use of that word. If this is the definition of nature, then
another way to put it is the essentially nonhuman aspects of the world.
It is
important to have a word and concept for this odd thing. Otherwise how can we share our itching
suspicion that the crystalline make-up of minerals and our own intractable
tendency to eat, sleep, and get distracted share some basic traits? They are both beyond our control, they
existed before we did, and they are unlike the Roman Empire or binary
code. They are not of human design, but
rather from the material world: beyond human dasein.
To borrow
another Heideggerian idea, nature is first and foremost that which is
present-at-hand. It is the material
stuff of the world, before meaning.
However, amazingly, it also has an order and a meaning inherent to
it. It is present-at-hand in that
various (mostly living) aspects of nature exist in a dymanic web of functions,
causal relationships, and symbiotic webs.
This is what we have come to recognize as ecosystems, and ecology. The “system” of the nonhuman world.
Of course, though,
humans are embedded in this world. We
are made up of stuff that isn’t us, and we everything we design is designed
from things that at root, weren’t designed.
And yet there is some sort of morality inherent in nature. There are things which can go “against”
nature—both human nature and the “green” nature of ecosystems. The more I learn about this aspect of nature,
the more I come to see culture (collectively taken as everything that is of human design) as struggling to
cope with its place in larger nature.
This struggle is bound up in our type of existence, which has to take a
stand on our own being. Nature—by
definition—does not have to do this.
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