자연의 의미망

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the multiple meanings of the word, ‘nature,’ which has recently become a buzzword frequently mentioned in a wide variety of contexts. The same is also seen in the discourses of ecology: nature is invoked and appropriated to legitimate the differing ideologies. The debates that have been generated around the idea of nature are so various and complex that one must carefully discern the specific meanings and contexts in which the word is put to use. This paper is first focused on the discussions about humanity versus nature to showcase how the concept of nature becomes destabilized and problematized. Most of the early ecological theories including deep ecology have criticized the traditional distinction between humanity and nature and argued that humanity has no right to domineer over, but forms a part of, the order of nature. In the same vein they tend to promote the idea of nature as a kind of pristine otherness to human culture and thus come to be mired into approving the humanity-nature dichotomy which they have rhetorically denied. Our next discussion is concerned with the politics of the idea of nature in which it is deployed notably as the primitive, the bestial, the corporeal, and the feminine. These have informed the dimensions of being from which humanity has sought to discriminate itself since the age of the Enlightenment. How these characteristics projected onto nature have been appropriated in the identity politics historically and culturally is also traced. Finally the paper deals with the image of nature as a tormenting face from the perspective of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and also briefly discusses the return of nature as a sublime Other in the age of climate change.