Philosophy Study, ISSN 2159-5313

September 2013, Vol. 3, No. 9, 836-842 D DAVID PUBLISHING

Nature and Culture Dualism: Genesis of an Obsolete Dichotomy

Fábio Valenti Possamai

University of North Texas


This paper will discuss the relation between the concepts of nature and culture and their intricate interdependency,
focusing on modernity. Moreover, it will analyze the dichotomy that has historically emerged and its implications.
Human beings have had different conceptions about what is natural and what is non-natural throughout their history.
Before Modernity we did not conceive nature as being a different ontological reality, we did not perceive it as being
separated from us. After modernity everything changed, and we began to see nature as a mere object. Nature
became, then, a representation, like a painting on a wall. Our contemporary world vision, Weltanschauung, was
formed mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries. There was, at that time, a considerable change in the way we
perceived and described the world. This new mentality and this new form of representing the cosmos provided the
basis for our new way of thinking. They were the substrate upon which our modern paradigm was erected. The
world’s conversion in an image only became a reality thanks to technology. But this change happened only because
of the paradigm shift originated in the 17th century. Technique always has been a way to articulate how (and what)
we think. With the Greek, technique (techné) was, at first, an extension of the physis. Thus, the technique was a
way of being instead of a way of thinking. After the paradigm shift in the 17th century (a metaphysical change, in
the very way we connected to the world), the human being left his former place. Perhaps would be even better if we
talked about nature and culture as being as a hybrid. What, at the source, was natural, through the flows of
production and consumption, undergoes transformations and becomes something that is not natural anymore but, at
the same time, not completely artificial either. Our world, once divided between the social and the natural, becomes
a space where a constant process, a continuous flow, is constantly happening. From that dichotomy between
something good and something bad arises a dialectic, in which we no longer can see any division whatsoever.

Keywords: nature, culture, dichotomy, world vision, hybrid

1. Introduction
Our people knew each plant, what its name was, its particular features, and how it could be prepared for use. The
people knew many things. (Ortiz 1980, 345)

The objective of this paper is to discuss the relation between the concepts of nature and culture and how
they have been developed throughout our civilization’s history, focusing on modernity. As we will see, human
beings have had different conceptions about what is natural and what is non-natural. Before modernity, we did
not conceive nature as being a different ontological reality, we did not perceive it as being separated from us.
After modernity everything changed, and we began to regard nature as some sort of object to be used and
exploited by us. Nature became, then, a representation, like a painting on a wall. Everything related to nature


Fábio Valenti Possamai, Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Fellow, Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University
of North Texas, USA; main research field: Philosophy and Environmental Ethics. Email:fabiovalentipossamai@my.unt.edu.
 NATURE AND CULTURE DUALISM: GENESIS OF AN OBSOLETE DICHOTOMY 837

suffered a great amount of exploitation due to this new vision, this new human project, namely, to tame nature
and control it. We can call this idea the Promethean Project.
[…] the historical geographical process that started with industrialization and urbanization and aimed at taming and
controlling nature through technology, human labor, and capital investment. The same process aspired to rendering modern
cities autonomous and independent from nature’s whims. This project transformed socio-natural landscapes across the
world and disrupted the preexisting ontological categories of “nature” and “the city”. (Kaika 2005, 5)

Therefore, in this very Promethean sense, the modern city appeared only to be an independent entity
completely separated from nature—the city was clean and orderly, nature was dirty and chaotic. During
hundreds of years we lived under this paradigm. However, we have been experiencing a paradigm shift, and the
way we perceive nature is also changing. We no longer conceive nature and culture as two completely
separated entities. Today, they could be seen as a continuum, a dialectical frame work, a hybrid (neither purely
human, nor purely natural), or maybe even as a whole (in a holistic way)—but, in any case, no longer separated.
Throughout this article we will dissect this process, from its origins until its present configuration.

2. Culture and Nature

The word nature, according to its etymology, comes from the Latin natura and has a direct relation to
nascor, which means the act of being born, to be raised—it is a procedural view of life. The Greek word for
nature is physis, which includes human aspects—thus the word physics. This is quite different from the modern
definition nature has assumed—today, it is something purely material, a mere object if you will. The ancient
Greek, on the one hand, nature as something dynamic, alive, and organic; our concept, on the other hand,
regards it as something static, without dynamism, without any kind of flux whatsoever. We could find an
excellent case of this ancient worldview within the Navajo (a Native American tribe) and their sacred houses
(hogans). For them, everything is a part of the natural world. “Navajo hogans are designated as male and
female because everything in the natural world has a male and a female aspect. It is through this that nature and
human beings regenerate. Navajos assign paramount importance to natural balance, and they achieve this by
according female and male aspects to all organic material in the natural world ” (Lane 1999, 38-39).
This is a good example to demonstrate that not only the ancient Greek had this concept of nature as physis.
In the U.S., the Native Americans also had developed this conception in which everything was related to the
natural world—an order of things existed, and the Navajos accepted their place in this world, they learned how
to live with it, how to cohabit in the universe. Unfortunately, all this reality changed when we entered
modernity—and this ancient concept of nature was left behind as we moved towards “progress.” This change
occurred first in Europe, but soon it was brought to America too, and it spread its wings all over the world. It
was the European worldview that became predominant.
[…] I hereby subscribe to an apprehension of modernity as a period that began in the 17th century—characterized by a new,
forward looking world view and a new set of social expectations. The taming of nature became a major project within
modernity’s broader aims, a project that scholars came to term “Promethean.” Within this context, the modern scientist or
engineer would be the new Prometheus, who fights for human emancipation through the domination of nature. (Kaika
2005, 12)

Thus, the modern Weltanschauung affirms that we must use our reason to improve or perfect nature. This
world vision, with its idea of progress, had a great influence in the contemporary thought. Probably, this idea of
“improvement” had its origins in Francis Bacon’s time. However, he was not the only culprit.1 Besides him,
838 NATURE AND CULTURE DUALISM: GENESIS OF AN OBSOLETE DICHOTOMY

we could also cite Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton as fundamental exponents of this vision
that conceive nature as an object to be tested and controlled by us. Bruno Latour (1993) has an interesting
theory about this. He said that, as a part of this modernization project, the Western society first needed to purify
the world in order to study it better. Thus, nature became separated from society—this was the only way to
study nature. Obviously, the next step would be the complete taming of nature. When this stage was completed,
the world became separated into two sides, a natural one and a social one—and as it happens to all dichotomies,
a hierarchy was also created. The social side and the human side became better than the natural side.

3. Modernity’s Project
Our contemporary worldview, our Weltanschauung, was formed mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries.
There was, at that time, a considerable change in the way we perceived and described the world. Therefore, our
perspective was greatly changed during these centuries—time of the Scientific Revolution. This new mentality
and this new mode of representing the cosmos provided the basis for our new way of thinking. They were the
substrate upon which our modern paradigm was erected. The former notion we had, in which the universe was
organic and alive, was substituted by the notion of a universe considered as a machine, working through
mechanisms. In the 17th century, science began to use a new investigation method, which was advocated by
Francis Bacon. Such method was based on the analytic process, which consisted of strong empirical evidence
and experimentation.
The Scientific Revolution, grosso modo, began with Nicolaus Copernicus and his opposition to the
geocentric conception advocated by the Catholic Church. After him, Galileo Galilei was the first to combine
scientific experimentation with mathematical language to formulate the laws of nature. For him, nature was a
book, and we would only be able to read it if we learned the language in which it was written—and this
language would be the mathematics. In the last four hundred years, our world’s features have been fairly altered
by this scientific obsession for measurement and quantification. For Bacon, the objective of the sciences was
the total control and domination of nature by man—the victory of the human being over nature. He was the first
to use the concept of revolutio with a sense of profound transformations, which would ultimately result in a
progress. Until then, revolution was never considered as progress, but always as a return to an ancient period
(Greek Classicism, for instance). According to Fritjof Capra (1982), “after Bacon, the science began to pursue a
knowledge that could be used to dominate and control nature and, today, both science and technology aim to,
especially, profound anti-ecological goals” (51). Nature, for Bacon, should be forced to serve the human being,
it should be enslaved. It should be reduced to a blind obedience, and the role of the scientist would be to extract,
under torture, all its secrets. In his book New Atlantis2, Bacon created the vision of an interdisciplinary society
of scientists, which was called Solomon’s House, with the objective of knowing the causes and the movements,
as well as the hidden forces, present in nature. The scientist’s main goal was to increase the human knowledge
and our control over nature. But none of these accomplishments would have been possible without the
contribution of René Descartes.
Descartes was, besides a brilliant philosopher, an outstanding mathematician. He idealized a method to
achieve a complete knowledge of nature, through which we would have an “absolute certainty”—and such
science was based in mathematics and geometry. The belief on the certainty of scientific knowledge is the
backbone of the entire Cartesian philosophy and the world vision derived from it. The famous Descartes’
corollary Cogito, ergo sum was the starting point for the deduction that human essence resides in the thought
 NATURE AND CULTURE DUALISM: GENESIS OF AN OBSOLETE DICHOTOMY 839

(res cogitans), and we, through it, would represent and apprehend mathematically all existing things (res
extensa) in the world, including the world itself. The Cartesian method is analytic, and consists in decomposing
the components of everything and put them in an order of knowledge—from the simplest to the most complex.
This fragmentation method became one of the Descartes’ most important contributions to modern scientific
thought—and thanks to it we were able to achieve such a degree of scientific development. However, due to
this same segmentation we created a generalized attitude of scientific reductionism.
Descartes based all his conception of nature upon the division between res cogitans and res extensa, i.e.,
between the mental thing and the material thing—with the res cogitans being ontologically superior to the res
extensa. According to Descartes, the material universe was a machine, a mere mechanism to be studied,
reduced, and fragmented. This division has caused an endless confusion between mind and brain (which we
were not able to solve until today) and in quantum physics, early in the 20th century, Werner Heisenberg had
some problems due to it when he tried to interpret his observations of atomic phenomena. He stressed that
“This division has penetrated profoundly into the human spirit in three centuries that followed Descartes, and it
will take a long time before we can replaced it by a truly different attitude regarding the problem of reality”
(Heisenberg 1962, 81).
This change in the way we perceived nature, from an organism to a machine, had a stark effect upon our
civilization. It is an interesting fact to notice that Descartes shared Bacon’s ideals, and both postulated that the
objective of science is domain and control of nature, and that the scientific knowledge is the perfect tool to
achieve this goal. This mechanistic conception was extended to the entire reality, and the plants and animals
began to be considered just as machines—only the human being, endowed with reason and a soul, would
possess the rights to reign over the planet.
The 18th and 19th centuries have utilized with great efficiency all these teachings. The mathematic system
being to conceive reality became the dominant (and very popular) theory among scientists as well as among lay
people. The image of the world as a functional machine, introduced by Descartes, became truly a symbol of
human domination. As a consequence of the establishment of this mechanistic concept during the 18th century,
physics became the base for all the other sciences. The world’s conversion into an image only became a reality,
thanks to technology. Technique always has been a way to articulate how (and what) we think. With the Greek,
technique (techné) was, at first, an extension of the physis. Thus, technique was a way of being instead of a way
of thinking. After the paradigm shift in the 17th century (a metaphysical change, in the very way we were
connected to the world), the human being left his former place. Hence, he was not a mere spectator anymore.
He became master of nature and a subject in the world.
The representation of being, which used to be ontological, became mathematical, as the world was
transformed into an image achieved through a mechanistic process from the standpoint of our subjectivity. The
question of being given place to the question for the method—it is not the being, but the how that matters now.
The essence is exceeded by the procedure. After Descartes, we started to believe that we could reach an
“absolute certainty” solely based on our own strength, for ourselves and in our own terms. The search for an
absolute and unconditioned foundation has the human being itself as objective, and the physis loses its substrate
condition for reality. The physis, defined as nature, and transformed into a mere object of our representation,
becomes dominated mathematically. It is the cogito (ergo sum) that allows the world’s transformation into an
image—this is the only way nature could be manipulated.
840 NATURE AND CULTURE DUALISM: GENESIS OF AN OBSOLETE DICHOTOMY

4. Beyond the Dichotomy

Nowadays, we are beginning to see nature and culture as intertwined once again—not ontologically
separated anymore. Today, we could assert that the dichotomy between subject and object, or maybe even
nature and culture, does not exist anymore. These entities are not separated, there is an interrelation between
them—we could even say a continuum. “What I used to perceive as a compartmentalized world, consisting of
neatly and tightly sealed, autonomous ‘space envelopes’ (the home, the city, and nature) was, in fact, a messy
socio-spatial continuum” (Kaika 2005, 4).
Our environment only assumes a truthful meaning when it can relate to us and vice-versa, it is an
interdependency relation—it came into existence and achieved development through us, and in the same way,
we are only “alive” thanks to our environment and our very existence is provided by it. The paradigm of
modernity, despite having brought several benefits to us, also left this terrible inheritance. We were able to
make incredible advances regarding technology, but on the other hand it also provoked the environmental crisis
we are facing today. However, it seems that we are rescuing the concept of nature as physis once again.
As efforts to rethink the society/nature divide intensified, the need to revise the concepts that govern thinking about such
matters became increasingly apparent. Scholars identified a need to talk about the points of contact themselves and to
address the inseparability of “nature” from “society”. For some, this has come to mean identifying a single concept that
captures the “hybridity” of life in the world. (Kasper 2008, 12)

Hence, perhaps would be even better if we talked about nature and culture as being as a hybrid. What, at
the source, was natural, through the flows of production and consumption, undergoes transformations and
becomes something that is not natural anymore but, at the same time, not completely artificial either. Our world,
once divided into the social and the natural, becomes a space where a constant process, a continuous flow, is
constantly happening. From that dichotomy between something “good” and “bad” arises a dialectic, in which
we can no longer see any division. This would imply in cognition of the non-separability between nature and
culture. Perhaps we should say, then, that we have, besides a traditional position in which Nature is objective
and Society is subjective—a position in which we would have an objective Society and a subjective Nature.
Two things became one—a metaphysical whole. The new physics and the quantum theory, for instance, provide
us with an idea of holism—similar idea is also found in ecology, which offers a similar structure compared to
the one provided by the new physics.
A careful analysis of the observation process in atomic physics demonstrates that subatomic particles do not make sense as
isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and its
consequent measurement. The quantum theory reveals, then, a basic unity of the universe. It shows that we cannot
decompose the world in smaller and independent parts. As we enter into matter, nature does not show us some kind of
isolated “basic building blocks”, but an intricate net of relations between the many parts of this whole. […] This means
that the classic idea of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian division between the ego and the
world, between observer and observed, cannot be made when we deal with the atomic matter. In atomic physics we cannot
talk about nature without, at the same time, talk about ourselves. (Capra 1975, 68-69)

The concept of nature, derived from this new conception of environmental ethics, follows the example of
the New Physics—i.e., it is holistic. It becomes impossible to conceive organisms as being isolated, fragmented,
and segmented. They would be like us; they would be part of this extremely complex web of life. Contrary to
the classic conception of biology and physics, whose ontologies were based upon the separation between
subject and object, in which the individuals were conceived as isolated from their environment, the idea present
 NATURE AND CULTURE DUALISM: GENESIS OF AN OBSOLETE DICHOTOMY 841

in the New Physics and the New Ecology necessarily involves the conception of other-than-human beings as
making part of the very fabric of existence, before all the system would be implicated.
Under this standpoint, ecology revisits the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations. Such doctrine,
associated with philosophers from the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries like Hegel, Fichte, Bradley, and
Royce, postulates that the essence of something is determined by its relations, and cannot be considered
separately from its relations with other things. But we do not need to search for a good example of what we are
saying here among those philosophers. In the very wise words of Gary Snyder (1990):
As an agency nature is defined as “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.” Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that
everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy,
and nothing—by definition—that we do or experience in life is “unnatural”. (8-9)

Latour once said that networks are great to break down the artificial boundaries established between
domains. We need to bring those barriers down. On one side, there is nature; on the other, there is culture. They
are like two countries which borders are constantly causing problems between them. One wants to invade the
other and completely erase the “national identity” of the other. Barriers between neighbors are not a good thing
to have, since they exchange everything—one country cannot live without the other. Thus, the very existence of
one relies on the existence of the other. If we destroy one country, the other will perish.
Therefore, as we could see, we should not conceive the world as being divided anymore, as being
separated between these two ontological instances, one natural (land, water, forests, and so forth) and the other
cultural (human beings, society, cities, and so forth). The world is a historical and geographical process of
constant and endless metabolism (not merely biological, however), truly an open system. In this system, the
social and the natural aspects of reality contribute to produce a socio-natural outcome, where different kinds of
components exist together. Every aspect of life (not just human life) is represented—chemical, physical, social,
economic, political, and cultural. And even though all these processes could be highly contradictory, all of them
are absolutely indivisible and cannot be separated from one another.

Notes

1. But I would like to stress that all these philosophers and thinkers were very important to the development of our
civilization (Western civilization, at least). They are not the “culprits” for the current crisis we have been through—moreover,
their thought greatly influenced our modern and contemporary societies—with its pros and cons.
2. Bacon (1973), written in 1624, but published only in 1638.

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