Nature: The Most Complex Word in the English Language
Raymond Williams, the Welsh literary scholar, on why ‘Nature’ is the most complicated keyword in human thought
“A simple measure of the importance of ‘nature’ as an idea is to imagine us dispensing with the term and its meanings altogether. The ‘hole’ in our language would be enormous. We’d be rendered both inarticulate and incapable in large areas of our thought and action. In short, if we didn’t already have the term in our present-day vocabulary, we’d probably have to invent it.”
– Raymond Williams
What is a ‘keyword’?
When the Welsh literary theorist and novelist Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society in 1976 it became an instant classic. In Keywords, Williams brings his deep historical lens and cultural insight as a literary scholar to over a hundred commonly used words in English: from ‘art’, ‘humanity,’ ‘genius’ and ‘violence’, to ‘capitalism’, ‘sex’,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘revolution’.
For Williams, for a word to be a keyword, it must have three characteristics:
- First, it must be ordinary. We should be able to encounter this word being used by all kinds of people using it in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of ways.
- Second, rather than fads and buzzwords, keywords endure the test of time. They stick around through the decades and centuries, even if their meanings may have shifted.
- Finally, because keywords are often taken for granted, they come to deeply shape how we think about the world: the reality we perceive. But in shaping our thinking, keywords have social force: they shape how we act in the world too.
Connecting and Interacting
Like a dictionary, Williams arranged his keywords in alphabetical order: ‘aesthetic, ‘behavior’, ‘city,’ ‘dramatic’…on up to and ending with ‘work.’
But Williams wasn’t interested in creating another dictionary, like the Oxford or Merriam-Webster. For Williams, “the Dictionary is primarily philological and etymological” and are “much better on range and variation than on connection and interaction.”
“I would hope that while the alphabetical order makes immediate use easier, other kinds of connection and comparison will suggest themselves to the reader, and may be followed through by a quite different selection and order of reading.”
– Raymond Williams
Connection. Keywords exist within a field of meaning connected to other words, like nodes in a web. I like to imagine Williams’ keywords as rhizomes (also known as creeping rootstalks): subterranean tubers that grow out of sight, and where each node (keyword) is like an entry point into a vast field of interwoven meanings. While we may not realize it, rhizomes are hard at work making new connections as they continually forge new links with other roots over time.
For example, take another one of the ‘two or three most complicated words in the English language’: culture. This keyword is complicated in part because it is used “in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought,” Williams says. In other words, as the word culture (and its related words/phrases like cultural, cultivated, high culture, culture-vulture, sub-culture) was used in different times, places, and societies to make sense of the world, the word became caught up in different fields of meanings. For some, culture captured the range of artistic activities that make up a distinct national heritage: music, literature, theatre. In the field of anthropology, culture came to be connected up to very different clusters of ideas about human behavior, social relations and society:
“Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns — customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters — as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms — plans, recipes, rules, instructions… — for the governing of behavior.”
– Clifford Geertz, 1966.
Interaction. But there is another interesting thing about the keyword ‘culture’. Implicit in the meaning of culture, is everything that is not culture.
In Western thinking, and especially since the Enlightenment, the word culture became entangled with ideas about what it means to be human, where culture is a uniquely human activity that sets us apart from (and often above) everything that is not human: all that ‘not-human’ stuff that humans could compare themselves to. And so the ‘nonhuman’ became a hidden and implicit backdrop to prop up our burgeoning ideas about what makes humans so special. This implicit background against which human dramas could unfold was another extremely complex word in English: nature.
As the anthropologist Bruno Latour puts it in his iconoclastic book, We Have Never Been Modern,
“the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures -different or universal — do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison.”
For Williams, the important thing wasn’t just to say that the meanings of a keyword simply change over time. His point was that a keyword changes in interaction with shifting social, economic, and political circumstances. In other words, what makes a keyword so complex “is not finally in the word [itself] but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate.”
Williams understood keywords as powerful tools, not just because they help people make sense of new realities, but because they become essential tools in shaping those realities.
In other words, keywords, like culture and nature are world-making devices: the way they are used can have profound consequences for the organization of social relationships and society. How society understands what culture and nature is, the interaction between them, and even whether their are separate things to begin with, has profound effects on shaping material realities.
Just think of all the different ways we come to define and value ‘nature.’ How does our definition of nature (or wilderness) shape what version of nature we love and deem worth saving, and what kinds of nature we balk at? Like the philosopher of science, Donna Haraway asks,
“what form does love of nature take in a particular historical context? For whom and at what cost?”
Nature: the most complex word in the English language.
In coming to the conclusion that ‘Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language,” Raymond Williams writes that “Any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought.” To capture some of the term’s significance in only a few pages, Williams analyzes how the historical evolution of the word nature has led to three distinct ways of using the term:
- “The essential quality and character of something” as in ‘the nature of a rock’ meaning the quality or character of a rock (what a rock is).
- “The inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both.” Here, the qualities describing a single thing (or category of things) like a rock expands to become an abstract force directing and characterizing all things (something closer to ideas of God or the laws of physics).
- “The material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.” This is probably the most common idea of nature today, as plants, animals, ecosystems, and basically, everything not made by humans. This idea of nature is expressed when we talk about nature poets or nature-lovers.
This third definition is also the idea of nature that I’m most interested in. It’s the most common use of the keyword nature that underlies the two dueling poles of environmental politics today: between environmentalists and anti-environmentalists.
Paul Wapner, professor of global environmental politics, describes these two poles of radically different views on nature as the dream of naturalism on one side, and the dream of mastery on the other:
“On one side, environmentalists held nature in high esteem and argued that humans should harmonize their lives with, rather than lord over, the natural world (naturalism). In contrast, anti-environmentalists or environmental skeptics understood humanity to be the fundamental fact of existence and have counseled using humanity’s innate gifts to rise above and outsmart the more-than-human realm (mastery).”
Towards New Keywords in the Anthropocene
Raymond Williams Keywords, as the editors of the revised and updated New Keywords write, was “renowned for providing a whole generation of readers with an effective, reliable distillation of the variety of meanings — past and present — attached to a range of terms that played a pivotal role in discussions of culture and society, and of the relations between them.”
But as times change, and the circumstances in which keywords are used change too, old keywords shift in usage and meaning, and new keywords (or potential keywords) pop up too.
One potential keyword is the Anthropocene, the idea that humans have become the dominant global force of nature. While the Anthropocene has gained traction over the past 20 years or so as a new keyword to describe the scientific diagnosis of our ecological crisis, other researchers, like anthropologist Jason Hickel, caution that it erases accountability of the real culprits of the climate crisis by grouping all humans together into a global ‘we’:
“The language of the Anthropocene has it wrong: not all people are equally responsible for climate breakdown. The global North has contributed 92% of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The global South has contributed 8%”
Only time will tell if the Anthropocene endures as a new keyword for the new era of ecological breakdown we are entering, or if it will be increasingly contested and ultimately rejected.
For me, it’s helpful to remember that the hundred or so common keywords that Williams identifies are not just words or concepts, but tools for defining our most pressing problems in society and, therefore the most pressing solutions we come up with to address them.
But my sense is that Williams would ask us to think about, Who gets to define what the urgent problems actually are? And what solutions we must support to address them? In other words, How is the business-as-usual crowd using keywords like humanity, culture, work, capitalism, and perhaps most importantly, nature, in order to resist calls for the kind of radical economic, political, and socio-environmental change needed to save our world?
Are we too enraptured by how these keywords are used by those in power when they tell us “this is just the way things have always been.” Or can we repurpose, remix, and redeploy these old keywords in new and transformative ways?
Do keywords even have that power? To make us nod in acceptance of their “sonorous summons,” as Williams puts it, to accept the ways those wedded to the environmentally destructive status-quo would have us use them?
Do we need new keywords, like the Anthropocene, in order to make sense of our current human and ecological crises? Or, can we salvage old keywords with fraught and problematic histories, like ‘nature,’ to address the urgent social and environmental crises of our times?
“When the most basic concepts — the concepts, as it is said, from which we begin — are suddenly seen to be not concepts but problems … there is no sense in listening to their sonorous summons.”
– Raymond Williams
