“Nature,” in Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and A.K. Thompson, ed., Keywords for Radicals, (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), pp. 279-86.
“Nature,” wrote Raymond Williams in Keywords, “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” It is derived from the Latin natura, as exemplified by Lucretius’s great didactic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from the first century BCE. The word “nature” has three primary, interrelated meanings: (1) the intrinsic properties or essence of things or processes; (2) an inherent force that directs or determines the world; and (3) the material world or universe, the object of our sense perceptions—both in its entirety and variously understood as including or excluding God, spirit, mind, human beings, society, history, culture, etc.
Additional Publication(s)
- Published in slightly revised form in Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. 1 (May 2016) [Read at monthlyreview.org].
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