What is Nature?

This was just a little freewrite from my class "The Idea of Nature in the Long 18th Century".

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  By human control, I mean conscious thought—our designs, to borrow an outdated use of that word.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.

A Republic of Letters

During the period now called the Enlightenment, from the late 17th through the 18th and 19th Century, there was a "Republic of Letters".  The various "philosphes" of Europe and the eventually the New World shared their ideas, their theories, and their lives by mail.  Their correspondence was prodigious--my volume of the letters between the German thinkers Goethe and Schiller is over 500 pages long.  They shared everything from poems to garden seeds--the thirst for knowledge was omnivorous.  They respected one another's cultural differences, indeed reveled in them--practicing foreign idioms on each other.  They also had their rivalries, each trying to outdo the other in advancing knowledge.  Yet it is hard not to think of their time as somehow more innocent than ours, their motives for intellectual work more clear.  They wished to expand knowledge for its own sake--to improve the life of all, not necessarily for their own profit (indeed their own societies often forbade profiting by their experiments).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In our day such idealism is scoffed at or derided as the mark of privilege.  Certainly those were privileged men, but they recognized their privilege and tried to espy all the further into the working of the universe because of it.