HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 25

in a wide range of different contexts. Clearly, 'nature' and its collateral
concepts assume their meanings within this larger family of dichotomies.
For instance, there's long been a (dubious) equation in Western discus-
sions of 'aboriginal' (or First Nations) peoples between certain meanings
of the terms 'nature', 'savagery', 'wild' and 'emotion' presented as antonyms
to 'culture', 'civilisation' and 'reason'. I say antonyms because the terms
in Figure 1.5 are frequently understood to be opposites , or (at the very
least) to designate qualitatively different aspects of the world. As geogra-
pher Gunnar Olsson long ago noted, it appears as if 'Everything is identical
to itself and nothing is identical to anything else. Nothing is itself and
not itself at the same time' (Olsson, 1980: 62b). For instance, the question
'do glaciers listen?', which makes sense in some aboriginal Canadian cul-
tures (Cruikshank, 2005), simply does not compute in Western discourse for
obvious reasons. Likewise, the celebrated environmentalist Aldo Leopold's
(1949) injunction to 'think like a mountain' would strike most of us as non-
sensical (or else counter-intuitive). They both rest on an apparent category
mistake.
What's more, the oppositions in Figure 1.5 o ften appear to be hierarchical ,
with one side coded positively and the other not. Yet this appearance is, on
closer inspection, something of a mirage. One of the paradoxes of binary
thinking is that in order for any one antonym to make sense it must neces-
sarily imply the meaning of the very thing it is the supposed opposite of -
what post-structuralists are wont to call its 'constitutive outside'. In Candace
Slater's words, each antonym casts a 'conceptual shadow' over its putative
'other', so functioning as an absent presence (2003: 10). This emphasises the
point that, upon close inspection, words are not like metaphorical mirrors
(or windows) whose meanings map neatly on to a world already divided into
discrete chunks. But there are three other important complications too.
THE DUALISMS OF WESTERN THOUGHT 2
The first complication is that 'nature', its collateral terms and the wider set
of dualisms listed in Figure 1.5 c an all have cognitive, moral and aesthetic
dimensions. In simple terms, cognition pertains to empirical questions (that
is, to describing and explaining the world) or to the use of logical reasoning.
Meanwhile, morality (or ethics) involves making value judgements. Finally,
aesthetics concerns what we regard as beautiful or ugly, moving or offensive,
andsoon.
Study Task: If you read this topic's Preface, refer back to the seven vignettes
included there. Otherwise, read these for the first time now. Then select two
examples from within each vignette that relate to cognition, morality or aes-
thetics, as appropriate. Note that many references to nature involve two or
all three domains simultaneously . For instance, in the 'Crime against nature'