Exploring Nature

I made it through the first book of John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, and then I had to take a nap. I’ve got a low threshold for this sort of thing. It’s a book about Alaska, an extended non-fiction piece. The first ten pages nearly made me ill with the literary (and journalistic) pretensions. But it got better. There’s nothing that makes me want to puke quicker than literary/metaphoric explorations of fishing. Unfortunately, one of my teachers has a thing about that, so I think I’ve read at least five different variations on that theme in the last two years.

I’ve never been able to get the “nature” thing. For a long time, this impeded my reading of people like Wordsworth and Emerson. Joe Viscomi put an interesting twist on the problem during his seminar on the Songs. He said: “It’s only recently that the word ‘nature’ began to mean the green stuff.” It’s another one of those inventions of the romantics that has become a commonplace. I resolved to look into this a bit deeper, so after my nap I did some more tripping through the OED.

Nature entered the language in the middle of the twelfth century. Its stem is Latin, nasci, “to be born” and the construction natura means “birth, constitution, character, course of things.” Reflecting on it, I can see why it chafes me so— it posits an origin, a source— which is foreign to post-structuralist thinking. I’ve never thought of things much in that way. I have felt that I sort of landed in the middle of something, and rather than speculating about origins it was more useful to look at the way that things are interrelated. The oldest definition is this:

1. a. The essential qualities or properties of a thing; the inherent and inseparable combination of properties essentially pertaining to anything and giving it its fundamental character.

In this sense, nature is Platonic, idealistic, and essentialist. The second definition, entering at the same time, reflects another philosophical twist:



2. a. The inherent and innate disposition or character of a person (or animal).

The rejection of the concept of “innate ideas” was a big part of Blake’s thinking. Taken this way, Blake’s railing against “Natural Religion” makes even more sense. For Blake, all that was good in man was given by God— not any inherent and innate dispostion. Another twist happens beginning in Chaucer’s usage of nature in 1374, reflected in the third nuance:



3. a. With a and pl. An individual character, disposition, etc., considered as a kind of entity in itself; hence, a thing or person of a particular quality or character.

This postulates a sort of unary quality to nature, introducing particularity and similar to the Saxon word often substituted for nature, kind. So, nature in this sense is a divisive strategy, a way of cataloguing the world— as in the fourth variant:



4. In various phrases: a. of (a certain) nature.
   In first quot. perhaps in sense of ‘origin’.

The fifth variant makes it even more “virtual”:



5. by (earlier of, on) nature, in virtue of the very character or essence of the thing or person.

But the sixth sense (coincidentally the earliest sense, entering the language in 1250) returns nature to the physical world:



6. a. The vital or physical powers of man; (a person's) physical strength or constitution (obs.); the strength or substance of a thing.

The variants which follow are really funny.



7. a. Semen. Obs. [used by Joyce] b. The menses. Obs. or rare. [used by Chaucer]

8. The female pudendum, esp. that of a mare.

Senses #7 and #8 are quite rare, it seems to have been an early sort of dirty joke. But it also paves the way for the more power-filled connotations that arose from the smoke of the Middle Ages:



9. a. The inherent dominating power or impulse (in men or animals) by which action or character is determined, directed, or controlled. (Sometimes personified.)

And from 1400 forward, it seems to be a combination of both the mental and physical:



10. a. The inherent power or force by which the physical and mental activities of man are sustained. (Sometimes personified.)

11. a. The creative and regulative physical power which is conceived of as operating in the material world and as the immediate cause of all its phenomena. balance of nature

Not a trace of a fish, mountain or stream here yet. In some senses, nature is the oppositional term to grace, and in other senses it’s used as an oppositional term to art, or the hand of man. Though a man might have a nature, it isn’t always coincident with the powers that be:



12. In various phrases: a. against, or contrary to, nature.

It takes until long after the renaissance for the “green stuff” to enter the picture at all, but it comes in with a vengance.



13. a. The material world, or its collective objects and phenomena, esp. those with which man is most directly in contact; freq. the features and products of the earth itself, as contrasted with those of human civilization.

And in the eighteenth century, the term goes wild, gaining moral overtones:



14. a. the or a state of nature: (a) the moral state natural to man, as opposed to a state of grace; (b) the condition of man before the foundation of organized society; (c) an uncultivated or undomesticated condition; (d) physical nakedness.

It isn’t until long into the nineteenth century that the term stabilizes into the big mess of terms like nature-worship which make up the fifteenth sense of the word. It’s interesting to me how the arc of meaning manufactures nature into a term meant to explain the way we are, and makes some people look to rocks and trees for the solution. They are pleasant, yes. But the cure for humanity’s ills? Spare me.