By MICHAEL FERBER, InDepthNH.org
A reader suggested I write a column about words referring to nature and ecology. That struck me as a good idea, because many such words have interesting histories and connections to other words, and some have been recruited for ideological warfare. But for those reasons I can investigate only three or four words in this column. I’ll look at a few more words at another time.
I’d like to begin with animal. It is used in two main but contradictory ways. Its largest range can be seen in its use as a contrast to vegetable and mineral, as in the first question of the children’s game. Here animal includes human. That is the way Hamlet understands it when he asks, “What piece of work is a man, . . . the paragon of animals.” Aristotle distinguished three kinds of soul: the nutritive soul, which all living things have, the sensitive soul, which only animals have (not plants), and the rational soul, which only humans have among the animals.
Soul, in fact, has everything to do with animal, which comes from Latin anima, which means “soul” or “spirit”; Latin distinguishes it from animus, “reason” or “will,” often with a negative sense (“willfulness, pride”) that English inherits with both animus and animosity. But anima can also mean “air” and “breath.” It is the exact sibling of Greek anemos, which means “wind,” and which English has in anemometer. The same root is found in Sanskrit aniti (“he breathes”) and anila– (“wind”).
Two unrelated synonyms for soul have similar semantic histories. Greek psyche comes from a root meaning “breathe” or “blow,” and Latin spiritus comes from a root meaning “breathe”; English has respiration, inspiration, aspiration, and perspiration from Latin developments of this root, as well as conspiracy.
So animals breathe; they are animate and animated.
The second way animal is used is as a contrast to human. The SPCA is not concerned with cruelty to humans. If we call someone an animal we are insulting that person, though there are cheekily adopted phrases such as party animal. We call an act beastly, bestial, or brutal that is usually beyond anything a real beast or brute would ever do. If wild animals could talk, they would no doubt use their equivalent of human to mean “the most vicious and destructive being on the planet.”
A key word and concept in modern discussions of nature is ecology, which goes back (spelled oecology) to at least 1875. It has gradually replaced economy in this domain. The poet William Cowper in 1785 wrote, “He that hunts / Or harms them [animals] … is guilty of a wrong, / Disturbs the economy of Nature’s realm.” In the fifteenth century and quite a while thereafter, economy (or oeconomy) meant “household management or husbandry,” and, in an evaluative sense, “thrift.” The first half of the compound in both words comes from the Latinized spelling of Greek oikos, which means “house” as well as “household” and “estate”: the oikos of Homer’s Odysseus included all his buildings, land, animals, ships, weapons, slaves, servants, clients, and family. To maintain it required skill at oikonomia, the “law or direction of the household.”
As economy widened to its main modern use, “production and consumption of goods and services and supply of money,” I think ecology filled the gap largely abandoned by it, though animal economy and vegetable economy are still in use. When I looked up ecology in the Oxford English Dictionary I was surprised to learn how old the word is, as it is only since 1970 or so that the word has widely circulated. Here is an example from 1904: “The study of plants that grow together, forming plant associations, in some respects the most interesting part of Ecology.”
Let me turn now to nature itself. The OED has 34 entries for it, and whole books have been written about what it means, so I will have to simplify drastically. We’ll have to set aside the eleven meanings listed as obsolete, such as “strength,” “excrement,” “semen,” “menstrual blood,” and “sexual desire”; most of them are euphemisms: we still speak of “the call of nature,” which we answer by going to the bathroom.
Human nature has been attested since about 1400, and our better nature and good-natured are also fairly old. This sense is something like “essential quality,” or “the way a thing is.” We speak of the nature of the beast (since 1678), and the nature of things, which translates the great Latin poem De rerum naturae by Lucretius. We also contrast nature with nurture, or heredity with environment, and we have been debating the relative weight of these factors for a long time.
By 1400 nature acquired the sense “the creative and regulative power which operates in the material world,” something within or behind the phenomena we perceive. It could be personified as male (God the Creator) or female (Mother Nature). The female version is very ancient, as we see in the Greek goddess Gaia (Mother Earth) and Latin Terra Mater, not to mention similar images in widely separated cultures.
And then there is the main modern sense: “the phenomena of the physical world taken altogether,” as distinct from human beings and their creations. We distinguish natural from artificial, for example, or nature from culture. We want to escape the man-made world for the natural world of lakes and mountains. And of course we denounce things we don’t like as unnatural or against nature.
It would be hopeless in a brief essay to blaze paths through much of this dense thicket of ideological uses and abuses of the words nature and natural. It’s not surprising that many thoughtful people want to avoid them altogether. A brilliant colleague of mine at UNH told me “There is no such thing as human nature.” I think that is seriously mistaken, but I can sympathize with wanting be done with the phrase, which bigots have deployed to prove men are superior to women, whites are superior to blacks, and homosexuals and trans-sexuals are degenerate.
Let me say something, finally, about the origin of the word. Latin natura has much to do with birth and kinship. It is related to the verb nascor “to be born,” the adjectives natalis (“natal”), nativus (“native”), and innatus (“innate”), and the noun natio (“nation, race”). The root originally began as gna-, as we see in our borrowed words cognate and pregnant. The gn- itself is a root that led to genesis, generate, gender, genius, and many other words through Greek and Latin, and, through Germanic, our words kin, kind, and even king.
So it may be helpful to think of nature in this broadest meaning as something that was born, that just arose or emerged, by itself. It was not made, not by humans anyway. We are latecomers to the scene, ourselves natural animals, but unique among them for our power to transform nature beyond anything beavers and termites can do. We did not make nature, but we can remake it, and denature it as well.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu. Website: michaelkferber.com.