Ivakhiv on the Idea of Nature and its Dichotomies

Over at Immanence Adrian Ivakhiv has recently taken up the question of the usefulness (or not) of the ancient concept of ‘Nature’ (here). As usual, Adrian’s post is a whirlwind of intelligence and nuance which creates a space for open consideration of various views on the topic.

In addition to some fantastic quotes from A.N Whitehead Adrian brings in Robert Corrington and C.S Peirce to begin tracing out ways to rethink the conception of Nature along the lines of an ontological and epistemological praxis.

My favorite passage is this:

There are many related ways of defining nature. Robert Corrington, for instance, calls nature “the sheer availability of whatever is” (fn. 1). The nature of nature, then, would be the availability of this availability — its coming-into-availability, its suchness (which I take to be a verb, not a quality belonging to something).

Since nothing merely is — everything is always in the process of becoming both itself and extending beyond itself, all things being self-transcending — the nature of nature is open-ended. Nature could thus be called immanent self-transcendence: immanent in that it is generative of itself, conditioning its own realization, and self-transcendent in its creativity.

Rethought along these kinds of lines (and there are many variations thereof), the idea of Nature shifts from being a particular idea that works its way historically into discourses of what is right (or wrong), what is good (or bad), how we should act (and shouldn’t), and so on, to becoming part of a practice of ontology and epistemology. What is this world (or universe, or pluriverse) we are part of? How are we part of it, and distinct from it? This is something that every entity answers in its own way, to its own (more or less) satisfaction.

In my view, a basic understanding of the cosmos as a transcending immanence, or creative emergent process capable of generating physical, biological as well as symbolic and existential ‘natures’ is the beginning of post-formal (non dogmatic) inquiry – a kind of explicit reasoning which allows raw experience (awareness) and the facticity that affords it to temper the excesses of all human knowledge (translation). Such an animalistic or brute appreciation for the terrain of Being and its vicissitudes fosters a playful theoretic attitude, perpetually driving us to think beyond such cumbersome intellectualizations as ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’.

In his post Adrian articulates a vision of the cosmos that is open enough to obviate the need for the dichotomy of Nature/Culture while, perhaps, not abandoning the concept of Nature itself. As Adrian suggests :

“…the idea of Nature can get us into some grave conceptual cul-de-sacs. (I’ve argued that before myself.) I’m just interested in reframing the conversation by sliding the idea of nature out of the vice-grip of nature-culture dualism.”

My gut-reaction here is to suggest that a liberated notion of Nature might still be useful – or, perhaps more accurately, be able to continue to generate certain aesthetic and psychological (spiritual?) resonances we might wish to retain.

I too appreciate the critical reflections of Slavoj Žižek and Tim Morton on the ideology of Nature, and accept that its current use does serve as a barrier to deeper ontological realizations of natural phenomena, but are we to abandon such a long-standing idea without first trying to rehabilitate those aspects of the term which have given rise to so much naturalistic thinking and resulting ‘environmental’ politics? I’m not entirely sure.

Adrian has also written an excellent paper in which he reviews Noel Castree’s Nature, Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social and John Law’s After Method. In the paper Adrian discusses key insights of these authors while arguing for a dynamic and open-ended view of the natural world. If you are at all interested in Latour, John Law, ANT and/or the falsity of the nature/culture conceptual divide this paper is definitely well worth the read:

Social Nature: Collapsing Dichotomies Without Unraveling The Fabric Of Things   by Adrian Ivakhiv

The world might be imagined as a web held together through oppositions, force fields of tension overlaid against each other into a delicate network that holds everything we know in the elastic space stretched between the opposable thumbs of multiple, invisible hands. By the world, I don‟t necessarily mean atoms, photons and light rays, proteins and cells, bodies, structures, systems, planets. I mean the world as an experienced, interpreted, storied, affective domain of relations, identifications, and involvements. In that world, or worlds (since they are differently experienced and conceived by every world-bearing being), meanings and values are conferred through distinction and differentiation: this is better than that, we do this and they do that, once upon a time things were this way but now they’re much worse (or better), and so on. We organize the patterns and regularities we see, over time, into categories such as darkness and light, earth and sky, cold and warm, raw and cooked, male and female, and then stitch these categories into bundles: dark-earth-female versus light-sky-male, or variations along these lines. These categories become the ways we make sense of our experience, which as always is imbued with feeling, desire, sensations experienced collectively and individually.

So it is with the categories nature and culture, or nature and society. Or wilderness and civilization, by which are generally meant something like nature at its utmost and society at its best (or worst). The terms change over time and under the influence of social, political, and scientific developments (as Raymond Williams and other historians of ideas have shown), and they don‟t necessarily translate between cultural milieus. If structuralist anthropology showed that each society configures its own overlaid sets of binaries by which to organize its conceptual world, post-structuralists, in their turn, have demonstrated that any such binaries are subject to the ravages of time and space, their meanings slipping and sliding from the grips of their users, and that they are always co-implicated with power, desire, and other such forces.

Read More: Here