Editorial: Courses of Nature

If the humanities are built around the idea of the human, they rest on a foundation of ideas about nature. In the disciplinary divisions that order modern knowledge, the natural world its physical laws and nonhuman materialities, its textures and structures and processes – have long been considered the realm of science, as declared by the name of the world’s most famous academic journal: Nature. The humanities, meanwhile, have mainly been about everything that nature supposedly is not. Language, culture, politics, art, history, philosophy – these are the things that have been made to mark the humanness of the human, setting us apart from the rest of the living world. Nature, in this framework, can mean many things: it is the raw material of society and culture, inert matter to be transformed by human hands and brains; it is an object of knowledge, to be placed under a microscope and converted into laws and equations and data; it is a threat to be quelled by technology and modernity; it is a symbol for something other than itself, a catalyst for human emotion, a secular stand-in for god.