HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 10

NATURE

The non-human world of
living and inanimate
phenomena, be they
'pristine' or modified.

The physical world in its
entirety, including
human beings as both
products of natural
history and present-
day biological organisms.

The defining features or
distinguishing quality of
living and inanimate
phenomena, including
human beings.

The power, force or
organising principle
animating living
phenomena and
operating in or on
inanimate phenomena.

'EXTERNAL
NATURE'

'UNIVERSAL
NATURE'

'INTRINSIC
NATURE'

'SUPER-ORDINATE
NATURE'

Figure 1.1 The principal meanings of the word nature in contemporary Anglophone
societies

it means the essential quality or defining property of something (e.g. it is natural
for birds to fly, fish to swim, and people to walk on two legs). Finally, it
refers to the power or force governing some or all living things (such as gravity,
the conservation of energy, the instructions contained in human DNA, or
the Coriolis effect). As a shorthand, we can (respectively) call these mean-
ings external nature , universal nature , intrinsic nature and super-ordinate
nature (see Figure 1.1 ). 8 Their differences notwithstanding, a common
semantic denominator is that nature is defined by the absence of human
agency or by what remains (or endures) once human agents have altered
natural processes and phenomena.
Clearly, depending on the context of usage, the idea of nature can func-
tion as a noun, a verb, an adverb or an adjective. It can also be characterised
as object or subject, passive or active. For instance, we can talk of a 'nature
reserve', 'natural beauty', a 'naturally destructive' hurricane or the 'natural
order' being disrupted. 'Nature' is both an everyday word used in quotidian
discourse, and also part of the lexicon of scientists and other credentialised
'experts'. Equally clearly, several meanings of the term nature can be in play
simultaneously. Consider mathematician Marcus du Sautoy's (2008) best-
selling topic Symmetry: a journey into the patterns of nature . Here, 'nature' refers
both to an object - the physical universe - and what du Sautoy regards as
one of its signature characteristics - its consistency and coherence. The same
is true of developmental biologist Mark Blumberg's (2008) Freaks of nature:
what anomalies tell us about development and evolution .Blumbergarguesthat
apparently 'freakish' living organisms like two-headed humans are in fact
governed by the same growth processes as 'normal' ones. They thus pos-
sess similar inner qualities (genetic and functional), if not the same outward
physical form (phenotype).
Not all the meanings of 'nature' can be used without contradiction. For
instance, understood literally, the idea that nature is universal would, in
philosopher John Gray's words, have us insisting that 'The internet is as
natural as a spider's web' (2002: 16). And yet the idea of nature as external
obliges us to say that people and their creations are not in any obvious sense
'natural' at all. Indeed, for some, our humanity consists in 'rising above' our