Mixx
kūpa 🇻🇪in many Indigenous cultures, there is no precise word for "nature", because you can't separate what was never divided; at least in the way modernity did. western modernity drew a hard line: humans on one side, all the rest on the other. one has reason the other doesn't. one has rights, the other has value. one is subject, the other object. this split made colonialism, industrialism and ecological destruction thinkable.
and of course, once Western civilization invents "nature," not all humans relate to it equally. some get placed closer to it (the wild, savage, primitive), while others get to stand above it (the civilized, rational, fully human). the nature/culture divide doesn't just separate you from forests, it gets replicated inside humanity itself, ranking bodies and peoples and justifying ideologically ethnocide-genocide-ecocide against us as a civilizing mission
Visibly Stupid Fucking Idiot@kupaye Exactly!!! This this this this!!!
Amboss_der_Rezitator@kupaye In medieval times, "nature" designed everything necessarily happening and necessarily developping. Apart from this, the human will was thought of as something different because it was thought of as the ability of acting contingently. Therefore it was not part of the realm of nature but the realm of ethics.
Chu 朱Never thought about this. In Chinese 自然 means "naturally". It's like saying "of course". Things that a given that don't need saying.
"Will you promise not to tell anyone?"
"自然"
Nature is "big 自然".
Things that are a given but on a big scale.
K-ZO da Snowman
燇空 jyun kong
muddle@flowrot @chu @kupaye In Japanese, this could be read as "self" and "sort of thing" which isn't too far off the original Chinese (source: the wiki page you linked).
Just chiming in to compare the Taoist view there (esp. the idea of "being itself, what it is) with later Zen thought (possibly inspired by Taoism) such as ultimate reality or Buddha nature being "the self selfing the self."
Also, nearly half way across the world, we have Heracles expressing similar ideas, esp. as referenced centuries later in the the poem "That nature is a Heracletian Fire...": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44397/that-nature-is-a-heraclitean-fire-and-of-the-comfort-of-the-resurrection
Which, long way round, brings me to mention that the second character, when given an extra fire radical becomes 燃える in Japanese, to burn. Interesting to think that they might be similarly related in terms of philosophies or views of the world..., perhaps a case of convergent evolution?
Alec Story
Elisabeth M
Ooze 𓁟@kupaye z It was there well before western modernity. It was created by the Christian doctrine that man has dominion over the world.
Michael Halila 🏳️⚧️@mhalila @Ooze I think the western concept of nature is a surprisingly recent one. It was assembled, piece by piece, over roughly two thousand years (the greek phusis, the roman silva, judaist anthropocentrism, etc), but it didn't reach its current form until about two centuries ago. the Scientific Revolution assembled the parts, to think a mechanical order, fully governed by law, in which the whole is just the sum of its parts. if anything, God was demoted to an abstract first mover
tom jenningsYou are correct, but i think the problem is even deeper. Western ideology insists that everything is contained in a hierarchical taxonomy, preferably reducible to s binary; mind body, heaven earth, good bad. Its nonsense all of it
All of a i is predicated on this absolutely unfounded idea of mind body separation.