One of the great antagonisms of the 21st century is that, as culture accelerates into increasingly artificial and commodified forms, manufacturing simulacral financial institutions and social structures mediated by advances in artificial intelligence (with even Facebook and Microsoft etc. adopting OpenAI systems) and by a globalized techno-capitalist economy—as humanity, in other words, adopts an increasingly universalized, late-stage culture—the fact of ‘nature’ exercises an increasingly brutal pressure. We may become more ‘cultured’ with every technological advancement, but each step away from whatever natural origins we had is marked by a simultaneous obverse: the violent re-integration of nature into everyday reality.
With every passing year, cultures and civilization as a whole, are being demanded to recognise the cruel and unstoppable presence of nature. High-temperature records continue to be broken, and natural catastrophes, from forest fires and floods to droughts and storms, shake the barricades which, as sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote, cultures erected in order to leave nature behind. ‘Nature’ appears to be corroding civilization, yet from the inside, threatening the basic coordinates of our shared symbolic reality—the large-scale destruction of a climate catastrophe that experts say is too late to avoid, or the promise of nuclear warfare that will return mankind to the stone age, these are everyday threats reproduced within culture as a whole. Ecology (in the form of carbon emissions and sustainable energy) are today, aspects of economic planning and policymaking; the ‘natural’ has imposed itself as a crucial and intimate factor within our most definitive cultural achievements.
If this is the case, if we are to ‘confront the natural’ from the perspective of contemporary culture, must we not, in this case, pause and attempt to articulate once and for all what might in fact be meant by ‘nature’? If the rule of nature over culture is immanent, it is more important than ever to ask the question of what this new master is, and to inquire as to what the obverse of culture is. In short, can we form an adequate picture of nature as the (to borrow a psychoanalytic term) ‘intimate exteriority’ of civilized reality? Unfortunately, nature is for philosophy a problematic category. For centuries attempts have been made to define it ‘for itself,’ outside of any cultural perspective, yet with each attempt, the contradictions and anomalies central to the idea of nature persist, leaving us in the dark as to what this ‘obverse of culture’ is that is threatening our existence.
One of the most coherent thinkers on the problem central to defining nature was the British Idealist F. H. Bradley. Whatever nature is, it is enigmatically intertwined with the metaphysical problem of appearance versus reality. In the attempt at defining nature in terms of a reality located beyond appearances, we are led into contradiction. Nature is posited as belonging to the Absolute—a self-sustaining and contradiction-free totality—the absolute of which we (as rational observers) are moments, and which in itself comprises the discrepancy between appearance and reality. This discrepancy is of an appearance that cannot be reduced to reality, yet which at the same time cannot be distinguished from it. Appearance is reality, but in a negative, or self-defeating way.
Nature, Bradley proposes, (as that which is posited by humanity as external to itself) belongs to this discrepancy of an appearance which we attempt to articulate outside of appearances as such. In other words, Nature is the attempt of appearance to negate itself, to think in itself that which is constitutively irreducible to appearance. Its reality is disjunctive, existent only insofar as it appears to something, and its reality is thus self-contradicting, defining itself by what it is not. Nature cannot be concluded to exist in any rational or independent way, but only in tandem with the method in which it is made present to us by our own investigation. Therefore by the definition of reality as that which lies beyond mere appearance, nature is not real, but rather embodies the contradictory moment of appearances that by themselves are a part of reality.
The natural world is something which is registered by the unquestionable sensations of the body, yet since both body and soul/mind cannot be established to have any concrete reality, the body-Nature relation is a relation of unstable and purely relational appearances. “Both Nature and my body exist necessarily with and for one another. And both, on examination, turn out to be nothing apart from their relation. We find in each no essence which is not infected by appearance to the other” (p.265). Nature has no stable internal essence, but is only its relation to my experience of my body. In other words, nature is only insofar as it is for something other than itself. If we remove that thing (whether mind or body, i.e. appearance) for which nature exists, its essential relation, we lose nature as such. Nature is only its external relation to appearances.
Thus nature is contingent to certain acts of phenomenally (i.e. experientially) appraising it, and cannot be said to hold a stable reality in itself. The paradox is that, as violent and extreme as it may be, “Nature is not real. Nature is but an appearance within the reality; it is a partial and imperfect manifestation of the Absolute” (p.267). Whatever ‘essence’ nature has, it is fundamentally an essence that is external to itself.
Nature and culture are two sides of a Möbius strip: nature appears to be the ‘other side’ of culture, but if we follow culture’s own logic, we find that this ‘nature’ is a side that is identical to the first, a side that is made possible by culture itself. The thought of Bradley is grounded in the German Idealists, and where we are concerned with nature, we see the basis of Bradley’s thinking in Hegel as well as Schelling. For Hegel, nature as an aesthetic principle, or as an artistic ideal, is oxymoronic. The height of aesthetics and the idea of nature cannot be reconciled, because we can never speak of nature by itself, but only in terms of a nature that is incorrectly posited by a subjective consciousness. A brief familiarisation with Hegel’s aesthetics will help here.
It is the capacity of an abstract idea to posit itself as a concrete thing (as a negation of mere abstraction), that determines its suitability for aesthetic representation. Where an idea does not lend itself to such particularization, by the obscurity and incompleteness of its essential and universal ‘ideality,’ its artistic representation appears as little more than nonsense. An imperfect essence/idea leads only to an inappropriate artistic representation, whereby the inconsistency of an artistic representation inevitably reflects the internal irregularity or incompleteness of the idea/abstraction being represented. An idea must presuppose its expression for the other, it must possess in-itself the coordinates of its concrete, aesthetic presentation. If an artistic idea does not presuppose its artistic form, any concretization of it will produce an unpleasant reflection of an incomplete universal. It is in the light of this logic that we understand Hegel’s recurring dismissal of the category of nature. Nature is precisely that category of the Idea which cannot maintain itself as a truthful, sensible representation. It is, in other words, a category for which the idea of it is not internally predisposed to any aesthetic formulation. In this Hegelian sense, nature is a false or perverted aesthetic, the attempt to artistically concretize an idea with no internal particular-universal presupposition which would lend it to art. Nature as such is not internally constituted to appear to an observer. It is ontologically ‘closed off’ and thereby rejects the crucial dimension of a representational, aesthetic tendency. In a similar way to Bradley, Hegel insists that our vision of Nature is precisely our distorted and subjectively coloured vision. Nature as such has no reality, since it cannot presuppose its external appearance for us.
When it comes to aesthetics, the value of artistic objects (objects predisposed for artistic representation) is a value installed by Spirit. Spirit (the impersonal conscious agency of human culture) formulates its artistic objects as other than themselves, forcing upon them the presupposition of a certain aesthetic ‘reception.’ The relation between Spirit and what lies ‘outside’ of it—nature—is therefore coloured by an interesting asymmetry: the ‘outside’ is perturbed by the value Spirit seeks to find in it. We would fail, therefore, to separate the object as it is for itself, from that variation of the object posited by an active subject. The category of nature adopts a problematic distinction by this logic, being entirely dismissed when it is employed as a value judgement, or as opposed to the use of words (for example in poetry). It may be objected that it is ‘natural’ to use some words, and ‘unnatural’ to use others, where the poet experiments with the representative capacity of language, but such an opposition proves entirely ineffective: “We can ask ourselves what this version of nature is that is opposed to poetics, since talking about nature in general, is to employ a vague and empty word” (p.225).
Hegel ultimately dismisses the indeterminacy and obscurity characterizing any use of the category of nature. As with Bradley, this ‘impossibility’ of the natural, or its ineluctable ambiguity to any observer, is understood as an incompleteness in the category of nature itself. Where the natural is used as an aesthetic critique (i.e. that something is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’), its outcome appears to be a confusion. Such confused or inconsistent use is not derived from the faulty use of the category of nature, but rather reflects the internal inconsistency of this category—its lack, in other words, of a stable internal essence. Nature’s paradox is that it can only be represented or articulated by simultaneously deviating from it and misrepresenting it. As with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, wherever ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’ (e.g. in the case of the natural world or the ‘here and now’) is used as a subjective reference-point, we find that its essence is always located outside of itself, in the conscious agency (as culture or as Spirit) which imposes its own conceptual frame and infuses the natural with its own subjective categories. Wherever we seek nature, it is a cultural subjectivity which we instead find—the attempt to think nature is the attempt of Spirit to think that which it cannot articulate. Every ‘natural’ viewpoint is thus tainted through being mediated by an entirely unnatural intention.
With Hegel, we recognise the failure of self-identity central to the idea of nature, Schelling would be another figure in the German Idealist tradition to question the independent validity of Nature. Schelling’s system of the Naturphilosophie, a philosophy of the idealized totality of nature, would, much like Hegel, make the case against a vision of nature as independent and self-explanatory.
According to the version of Schelling’s philosophy of nature set out in Ages of the World, nature develops as a system of conceptual self-positing, of determining itself according to a series of laws and relations which are furnished by itself as its own ground. Yet this ground of his system, i.e. identity, emerges only insofar as it is a system made possible by reason. The existence of reason, not of a single rational agent, but of an impersonal, abstracted agency of rational self-determination, an inherent logical order of apperception and understanding, makes possible the system of nature. Without the principle of a conceptual reason which posits the coordinates according to which reality articulates itself, natural reality finds no receptacle in which it can be expressed. In other words, without the conceptual form of reason that culture and humanity eventually exercise, nature itself cannot be conceived of.
Where philosophy is concerned (there are multiple examples, but here Bradley, Hegel, and Schelling are useful enough), nature cannot be understood for itself. It cannot, in other words, be understood as a coherent threat, or as a stable object which acts as the obverse of culture. Yet could it not be very easily objected that these are abstract, speculative systems, that they do not have a real-world meaning? On the contrary, what is most impressible about these idealists is the applicability of their thought.
German (and British) Idealists insisted that their systems—their philosophical doctrines—were not mere abstractions. On the contrary, they began with speculative or metaphysical propositions regarding being, nothing, the self, etc., in order to re-construct systems that could account for day-to-day existence as well as ethics, aesthetics, and logic. In other words, the everyday was, for them, metaphysical through and through—political and social experience, for example, could not be separated from its metaphysical ground, and metaphysics had to account for and presuppose lived experience; the metaphysical had to be reflected in the basic fabric of the everyday.
If nature is contradictory, or incomplete, this cannot simply be an abstractly deducted principle which belongs in the inaccessible realms of metaphysical isolation. If it is metaphysically deduced, this incompleteness of nature must be recognisable in everyday life. But is this not an unavoidable conclusion? Is ‘nature,’ and ‘the natural,’ not one of the most malleable and unstable terms which can be applied to social processes and human behaviour? Clothing, ideas, and forms of expression may malleably shift between cultural and natural. For example, cultural ‘critics,’ most famously Jordan Peterson, refer to natural hierarchies that are reproduced in human culture, yet contemporary zoologists have suggested that simplistic alpha-beta hierarchies are not particularly common in nature. In this case, it is clear that we speak of ‘nature and its order’ (its hierarchies and laws) as applying almost exclusively to the cultural, and as paradoxically exploded from nature itself. We all too often speak of a ‘regime of nature,’ and in this very act describe exclusively cultural phenomena. Under what conditions, then, does the natural abandon itself to the cultural?
As Terry Eagleton remarks in Culture, “Culture is a functionally variable term, in the sense that what may be cultural in one context may not be so in another. […] Drinking alcohol is a cultural affair, but it would cease to be so if it was the only way of quenching an intolerable thirst. Survivors of an air crash in some remote terrain who break open the drinks locker are not having a party. […] You may wear a head-dress in Qatar as a badge of your cultural identity, but also to avoid getting sunstroke” (p.53). The important point is of an unavoidable asymmetry: it is not merely the case that the natural occasionally ‘morphs’ into the cultural. Rather, the natural is only possible, can only be comprehended, according to the coordinates of the cultural. It is a deduction, a removal, of a symbolic or social token of a behaviour (e.g. drinking or wearing a hat), which in turn posits it as natural. The cultural calculates the natural by a negation of some quality which it believes to be the mark of itself. The natural in this sense is a reflection of the cultural’s understanding of itself.
There is certainly something that can be characterised as natural. Nature exists, in other words—no cultural theorist nor philosopher would deny this—however, this quality which constitutes ‘nature’ is internally volatile. The ‘natural’ is always an incomplete formula—it is obscured by the cultural coordinates which attempt to deduce it. To paraphrase F. H. Bradley, nature is, yet it is not real, if by real we mean a stable, self-identical thing which does not depend on its appearance to an observer. Nature is indeed a pressing concern for the 21st century, yet its essential inarticulability, our incapacity at positing it outside of our own subjectivised perspective, partially accounts for a fundamental problem: our inability to seriously respond to this threat. We know that the forces of nature will come to degenerate the civilised order, yet this knowledge is self-defeating. We are very aware of the fact that there is a looming ecological threat which may wipe out billions, but this threat is an invisible one. The threat of nature is the threat of a category that, from the perspective of culture, is incomplete and self-contradictory. Nature is a threat that is serious enough, and internally inarticulable enough, to be paradoxically ignored. However, recognizing this incompleteness of the idea of nature may, in itself, eventually translate into the ability to recognize the seriousness of the ecological threat.
Rafael Holmberg
Rafael Holmberg is a PhD student at UCL where he teaches on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His areas of research include German Idealism, political theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He has published in a variety of journals, magazines, and news-sites, and runs a newsletter (Antagonisms of the Everyday).
