The Paradox of Nature
When we talk about ‘nature’, the natural world beyond civilisation and culture, we inevitably talk about a paradox. ‘Nature’ as a category is often used with a certain intention, as a reference point with a more or less stable and determined essence. Yet is the this ‘essence of nature’ as stable as we presume? The standard opposition to nature is whatever is meant commonly by the term ‘culture’, denoting a certain collective and symbolic experience which either overcomes or builds upon nature. On the one hand you have culture and its various formations (including religion, ethics, art, ideology, language), and on the other hand nature (located at the obverse of the cultural, including evolution, survival, physical objects, chemical and biological laws). In this way, writers and philosophers for centuries have understood culture: something that exists only by and for mankind. That there is some division is undeniable, but there has nevertheless been a persistent failure to problematise this culture-nature division: a failure to recognise the asymmetrical, or overwhelmingly cultural, perspective with which nature is articulated.
A defining characteristic of culture is its scientific, economic, and political appeal to the order of nature, defining itself by what it has left behind in nature, and in so doing necessarily positing nature as something other than itself. At the same time, cultures often, whether secular or spiritual, pride themselves in embracing ‘natural’ ways, in living in accordance with what is determinately natural. But where the natural so frequently recurs in contemporary and classical discourse – where the necessity to recognise a doctrine of the ‘natural’, an order to which culture inevitably yields, often leads the way in religious, political, and scientific debates – is it safe to say that nature is consistently posited in each of its cultural discourses? Nature as a reference-point to reason (as an external formation demanding recognition) is undoubtedly an inevitable necessity in the formations of culture. Nature brutally imposes a demand to be considered as a sociological, political, psychological, historic agent. However the necessity to discuss nature appears, by closer approach, to be inextricably bound with a perpetual misconception of which phenomena it is that fall under the category of nature.
In his appropriately named book, Culture, Terry Eagleton points out this internal mutability of our cultural and natural categories, painting a picture of a nature immanently prepared to be framed as cultural, and a cultural category steadily toeing the line of being other than itself.
“Culture is a functionally variable term, in the sense that what may be cultural in one context may not be so in another. This is particularly true if one thinks of culture as what makes life worth living rather than what keeps it going. Exchanging gifts may be a cultural practice for us moderns, but in some premodern social orders it may be bound up with economic necessity. 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. An activity may be both cultural in the sense of decorative or non-functional, and non-cultural in the sense of fulfilling some biological need. You may wear a head-dress in Qatar as a badge of your cultural identity, but also to avoid getting sunstroke.” (p.53)
Culture ‘adds something’ to an object to infuse it with a value foreign to the object itself. It imposes upon the object an excess signification, makes it ‘more than itself’, whilst nevertheless leaving this surplus cultural kernel in an indeterminate obscurity. Not only is the determination of an object (e.g. an idea, a symbol, a piece of clothing) as cultural or natural entirely contextual, but there is additionally no defining trait which will make this object take on a definitive cultural form. Not only is culture variable: that which is cultural is, with a parallax shift, at the same time radically opposed to culture. Eagleton occasionally touches on this internal inconsistency of nature and culture, however he principally maintains that there is after all an autonomy of each respective category. Eagleton’s insistence is not upon an internal instability, but an external mutability, where two respectively autonomous categories can ‘switch places’: nature may become culture, but when it is nature, or when it has morphed into culture, we can nevertheless relatively coherently describe it as such.
There is nothing incorrect in this insistence that nature does exist independent of culture, yet for Eagleton nature is marked rather by its fluidity in relation to culture, and ease of interchangeable positions between the two, than by the internal difficulty of defining nature for itself (the book is after all called Culture, not Nature). Where ‘nature’ as such is considered, a separate issue is the incompleteness of this category, with the idea of nature lending itself to a series of erroneous or contradictory uses. The paradox, however, is that the variable use of nature emerges not simply because of our lack of comprehension or poorly defined idea of it, but by an internal volatility or inconsistency is this category itself. In other words, the misuse of nature (unjustly describing things as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’) is not caused by an incomplete understanding of what nature means, but rather reflects the internal incompleteness or non-autonomy of nature as a category.
The cultural appears to ‘disseminate’ into the natural (according to our epistemes as Foucault would say: the discursive conditions which determine the presuppositions for scientific investigation and in turn posit the mutability of objects of discourse according to transient ‘modes of knowledge’), which allows the cultural to ‘construct’ its vision of the natural. More than a case of switching places, as Eagleton suggests, the difficulty with the category of nature is that discourse on nature is culture’s discourse on nature – an asymmetrical (solipsistic) relation depicting an always-incomplete ‘natural state’. In a variety of discourses on nature, this category reflects its own internal inconsistency conditioned by the unavailability of a ‘pure idea’ of nature, instead being a category coloured by the aesthetic, sexual, cultural, and all too human perspective.
Wherever we turn to nature, we are all too often reminded of the extreme contingency of the natural to an unstable cultural opposite. Perhaps it can be argued that there are, after all, stable natural facts: DNA structures and brain functions with concrete effects on the human body and mind, chemical and biological rules, and atomic structures that make up all of material reality. But even these 'hard' demarcations reveal a problematic variability: epigenetics has showed that DNA structures are influenced by societal-cultural processes, cognitive science and linguistics reflect the reciprocal effects of culture within the biological systems of the brain, and even quantum physics problematises the ‘natural’ by discovering that quantum states appear to depend upon the operation of measuring them. To paraphrase Chesterton, reality reveals certain holes, certain inconsistencies, that are in turn structured, or reconstructed, according to the way we observe and interpret them.
We do not have an accurate idea of where and with what requirements exactly nature should be separated from culture. We can largely blame this on the fact that the culture has a weak understanding of its own content. Culture produces certain categories whose deviation at the same time can only be imagined from the perspective of culture. Culture implies qualitatively new contradictions. As an example, we can take language, an exclusively subjective/human (in other words cultural) communication system (as thinkers from Rousseau to Levi-Strauss, and even modern linguistics, have claimed). In everyday life we find hundreds of examples where language produces distortions that are only possible because of the use of language, and which can only be understood through the structures and internal logic of language. On his wedding day, a man may give a speech that he has spent months rehearsing in front of the mirror, but on the actual day he accidentally confuses his fiancée's name with her sister's name. Or a woman at her father-in-law's (who in this example might be called Hilder) funeral might happen to say that "it's such a shame that Hitler passed away when he was still so young". Such cases (about which Freud wrote three major books: The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious) are unusually significant in understanding the paradoxes of intersubjective and cultural relations. Perhaps they refer to how the groom really felt about his bride; perhaps they express a woman's implicit experience of her in-laws as hateful dictators. In any case, one thing is clear: language conditions certain deviations from the intention of its use, deviations that can nevertheless only be understood from the point of view of language.
Cultural communication (for example, language and art) implies in itself a necessary distorted communication (misunderstood sentences with double meanings, art's critical irreconcilability with itself). Culture forces itself violently into its own exceptions. What is considered different from the culture is not viewed in a neutral way, but is judged by a culturally fabricated judgement. Culture colours our perspective on its other, and in so doing obfuscates the neutral perspective. In this way, culture is responsible for what may be irreducible to culture. With our relationship with nature, we see exactly this. ‘Nature’ is the exception to culture which culture attempts to articulate. It is posited as an idealised product of culture, and is, historically speaking, an ideologically and aesthetically exploitable category. ‘Laws of nature’ too often denote artificial or subjective ideas, and the demarcation where the laws of nature become the rules of culture is, as both psychoanalysis and the history of ideas in science emphasise, an irregular and constantly shifting demarcation.
Hegel pointed out this paradox with regard to art already in 1835, with his introduction to aesthetics: the concept of "the beautiful", as a universal idea, sensually expressed in art, can be sought or investigated in nature (that is, apart from culture and human influence), but the perception we have of nature in this case (our concept of nature) has already been coloured by the perspective of ‘Spirit’ (the impersonal experience of human collectivity), coloured in other words by a perspective that seeks within the non-cultural an idea manufactured by cultural thought-forms. According to Hegel, the problem lies in the fact that nature as an Idea does not presuppose a concrete relationship with an observer. The concept of nature is incomplete, constitutively excluding the other in which it may be articulated, and therefore does not presuppose an aesthetic, sensual expression. There is no neutral nature; when we look for something in nature that can be adapted to culture, culture is actively looking for something alien within a culturally posited image. The paradox Hegel describes is that in attempting to express the aesthetics of nature, we seek the beautiful within culture's perception of its own inarticulable exception, of nature.
However, the problem of nature does not only take place on the aesthetic field. In political contexts, many have often claimed that some behaviours are ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. Homosexuality has in the past been dismissed as unnatural, but then justified, with animal observations and neurobiological studies, as natural, while others insist that nothing comparable to human sexuality exists in nature (in nature there are only simple sexual instincts). Human sexuality has been claimed to be the refined and unproblematic version of the unruly and unpleasant sexual relations of animals, whilst psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan (for example in the essay "On Freud's Trieb") point out that, on the contrary, perverse sexual deviations are exclusive components of the human sexual drive: sexuality is the embodiment of a failed natural relation, it is a distorted relation to an imperfect, non-existent object, and thus expresses the failure of locating nature, or the natural, within sexuality. In animals there is no masochism, no fetishes, or other characteristics that hinder the "natural" sexual goal; these distortions are characteristics only of a human sexuality that exists in relation to an inarticulable unconscious formation. The centre of human sexuality is always missing, it has no natural ground, but rather a lack of ground - and thus installs a continued series of impediments to its own goal. Sexuality is, for Lacan, its own contradiction.
The category of nature is not only determined by our cultural and social formations, as we see with certain contradictions in the history of ideas, but is also exploited by these same formations. That nature is exploited by culture is meant not only physically (with agriculture, mining, deforestation, etc.), but ideologically. Historically speaking, we have already experienced a more obvious form of this abuse. Scientific racism, Nazism, and doctrines of ethnic superiority, have often been founded within a vague reference to the laws of nature: for example, that nature appears to have an indelible hierarchy, and that this ‘natural’ hierarchy must be reflected and maintained within human societies. Racial science used a distorted concept of nature when it tried to explain that there are completely "natural" cognitive and psychological differences between different races and ethnic groups.
That we sometimes have to distinguish between nature and culture is perhaps inevitable, but the problem lies in the fact that this depiction, and the conditions for such a demarcation, are always determined from the non-neutral, artificially coloured, cultural point of view. Yet as we see with Hegel and with Lacan, for example, this is not merely a fault of culture, but a fault of the incompleteness of nature: nature seems to presuppose this confusion by lacking a fundamental kernel of self-identity. Thus the abuse of nature as a reference point does not entirely reflect a failed categorisation, or simply a failed recognition of nature, but rather reveals the internal incompleteness, and the inherent tendency to exploitation, of this nature as such.
This problematic position of nature may appear as a marginal and relatively unimportant issue. Today, such a paradox perhaps only applies to art-and-philosophy debates? On the contrary. The nature-culture boundary still has concrete and practical consequences today. Issues such as the climate catastrophe or mass migration must be collectively recognised and approached in collaborative efforts, and for this to be possible it may be useful to question what is meant by 'nature' and 'natural' in these contexts. Public figures with political platforms have and continue to use a kind of rhetoric about the earth's natural cycles; different beliefs that whether we participate or not, the Earth's climate will inevitably and naturally warm up and then cool down. The ‘natural law’ is considered here to be some kind of dialectic, a self-regulating process. "Don't worry too much, nature behaves in special ways regardless of how we engage with them". The contradiction in such an expression is inevitable: we insert a speculative logic into nature, and in so doing assert the ‘speculative structure’ of nature - its conceptual-logical form.
The migration issue involves similar problems, where different opinions reveal a use of the concept of nature from an ideological and cultural perspective. "People groups don't usually mix, it's unnatural", "Hating other groups because of cultural differences is itself a consequence of culture, therefore such people group hatred is unnatural", "We have a natural need to associate with those who are similar us” – such expressions are common contributions to the debate. Terry Eagleton's Culture tackles exactly this problem: culture is a useful tool, although it is constituted by a variable and enigmatic relationship with the non-cultural. We should therefore pay attention to the paradox that the term "nature/natural" can easily be used in directly opposite ways when it comes to our migration policy.
‘Nature’ is an ideologically coloured concept, and when it is separated from culture, this is often with a culturally grounded (scientific, aesthetic or politically conditioned) intention. Presenting nature as an ideological category therefore implies a new frame for debate. When nature is used as a political concept, a critique of this concept can above all show, just as Hegel claims, that "when one talks about nature in general, one uses an unclear and empty word". Nature is precisely this: empty. It should be recognised that the irregularities in discourses on nature do not stem from an incomplete comprehension, but rather from the internal incompleteness and imperfection of the category of nature.