Constructed Nature

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

Nature is supposed to be the domain unspoiled by human influence, yet the concept has been shaped by numerous dichotomies. The nature-culture and nature-nurture divides are used to define the limits of human influence. The natural-supernatural binary underpins the opposition between science, labeled natural, and religion and magic, considered supernatural. Tracing all these dichotomies reveals the ways nature has been constructed.

Isaac Newton seems an unlikely advocate for the supernatural, given that he is portrayed as the chief architect of a mechanical worldview. Yet, his physics actually posited supernatural and divine intervention. In 1692, he stated, “For if there be innate gravity, it is impossible now for the matter of the earth and all the planets and stars to fly up from them, and become evenly spread throughout all the heavens, without a supernatural power.” The supernatural explains why gravity doesn’t collapse everything together.

If the supernatural seems out of place when included in Newton’s physics, you might be surprised that, in his era, the supernatural was explicitly excluded from religious discussions of witchcraft. Reacting to two women accused in 1664 of bewitching children, Thomas Browne, an English doctor and early scholar of religion, testified that “the Devil in such cases did work upon the Bodies of Men and Women [but did so] upon a Natural Foundation.” Browne elaborated in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1672), “being a natural magician [the Devil] may perform many acts in ways above our knowledge, though not transcending our natural power.” The devil and demons have natural rather than supernatural powers.

Nature and its boundaries had a complicated pedigree even before the seventeenth century. The term supernatural (Latin supernaturalis) emerged in the thirteenth century following the rediscovery of Aristotle, and it combined two earlier concepts of nature: the Greek phusis, meaning “the genesis of growing things” in Aristotelian terms, and the Latin naturalis, which was associated with lex naturalis, or natural law, that connected divine commands and the natural order. 

With the changing meaning of nature, miracles became a problem. If miracles were considered natural, then they did not enhance God’s majesty. Conversely, if miracles were “against nature” (contra naturum), then God was “unnatural” and thereby violated divine laws by enabling them. To resolve this paradox, theologians redefined miracles to be above (super) nature and not against (contra) nature; the term supernatural could describe divine exceptions to natural laws. This classification relegated demonic “wonders” and even “magic” to the natural realm, though it sometimes categorized them as praeternaturalis, meaning “beyond nature,” extraordinary manifestations of otherwise natural powers. 

The distinction between natural and supernatural did not yet encompass a divide between natural and cultural. Initially, the Latin cultura, or culture, meant “the cultivation of natural growth,” extending by analogy to human development and, in Medieval Latin, to divine worship (cultus). The split between nature and culture, Philippe Descola suggests, began to emerge in the sixteenth century when Europeans increasingly viewed themselves as cultured beings distinct from the natural world and colonized people. By the nineteenth century, the study of culture had been bifurcated from nature, and physics, derived from the Greek phusis, had emerged as an academic discipline establishing its authority by separating the natural from the supernatural in its quest to unravel nature’s secrets.

What are the implications of this history?

First, scholars of religion routinely use the term supernatural to distinguish magic and religion from science, but the supernatural was merely a phantasm emerging from a specific paradox in medieval Christian theology. Consider demons and exorcism, Giovanni Bazzana has shown how pivotal they were in Christian history, but these wicked spirits and purgation practices appeared before any explicit concept of the supernatural was articulated. Many non-European languages have terms for “unusual” or “mysterious,” but these languages lack indigenous terms equivalent to the term supernatural. In Japan, fushigi, meaning “mysterious,” dates back over a thousand years, but chōshizenteki was only coined in the nineteenth century to translate “supernatural.” 

Second, the nature-culture binary promotes human exceptionalism that fails to recognize not only the materializations of social construction but also the complex interactions and learned behaviors among non-human animals. Humpback whale songs evolve over lifetimes and are shared with peers. Bumblebees teach each other new behaviors. Wolf packs are socially constructed. Our bodies, too, are a product of a multispecies environment, having been shaped by our co-evolution with gut microbes and domestic animals. 

Finally, the term nature has long been normatively loaded. The construction of nature is part of how society was naturalized. A presumed nature-culture divide distorts our world in which human and non-human have always been intermingled, inseparable. Environment and heredity are deeply intertwined. The natural-supernatural divide, too, is an imposition that did not even work in Early Modern Europe. Some experiences defy neat categories. Nature’s dualisms are better dismantled than constructed.