Williams and Marx Readings
After reading Raymond Williams’ Ideas of Nature passage and the selection from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, I feel that I now have a much more complex and multifaceted view of how nature is perceived and about man’s presence in association and relation to nature.
The central question that continuously presents itself throughout William’s writing is whether or not man is included within the realm of nature. Williams demonstrates during his analysis a development of how nature has been viewed over time. Initially, he recognizes a crucial parallel between the acceptance and belief in monotheism and the moment of recognition of a “singular Nature.” Williams goes so far as to state that “God is the first absolute, but Nature is his minister and deputy.” Nature is further evolved and seen as the “absolute monarch,” “an object, even at times a machine,” and the “selective breeder.” Williams projects the concept of Nature as having a history and an evolution, bringing forth the question; can man be included in that evolution?
As Williams’ excerpt continues, he begins to discuss the “abstraction of man.” To support his findings, he discusses the viewpoints of three well known philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Hobbes described the state of man in nature as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” projecting a quite dismal view. Locke however determined man’s relationship to nature as being peaceful and good willed. Finally, Rousseau landed somewhere in between the two opposing views, calling natural man “instinctive, inarticulate, and without property.” Williams concludes his selection by moving towards a more modern interpretation that man must be separate from nature since human practice is to conquer, dominate, and exploit the earth.
From Marx’s passage, a softer image of nature is projected through the idea of the influence of the “pastoral ideal” on American experiences, notably in literature. Marx intimates that this idea of sentimental pastoralism is derived from people’s innate sense to flee from the cities and cultivate lifestyles “closer to nature.” In a sense, Marx is saying that man must be connected to nature as we are continually drawn back to it. In order to support his claim, Marx goes so far as to quote Freud who interpreted that people’s yearning for expansive landscapes to be associated with the “freedom from the grip of the external world.”
Marx’s central example revolves around a passage written by Nathanial Hawthorne which describes the nature surrounding him in “Sleepy Hollow” in a euphoric and beautiful manner. However at one point in Hawthorne’s inquiry into his surroundings, his train of thought is interrupted by the violent whistle of a locomotive. Throughout the rest of Marx’s interpretation, he continuously refers back to this “little event” where it is evident that the natural world and the world of man are inevitably intertwined. There is a juxtaposition of the “real” world and the natural, idyllic, pastoral world that cannot be escaped.
From my own perspective, I find myself believing that man is in fact included in the realm of nature. Although Williams proposes the idea that nature must be separate from man if man is to intervene and command it in the manner we currently do, I feel that we are all still part of the earth and therefore part of nature. Man may be at the top of the so-called hierarchal system of nature, yet that does not mean we are not part of the system. When thinking of this, I was reminded of the video “The Grizzly Man” wherein Timothy essentially sought to strengthen his bond with nature and intertwine his world with the bears’ world, even perhaps wanting to become like the bears he observed. In my opinion, it’s not so much that man is separated from the realm of nature, it is that sometimes we intentionally remove ourselves from it. However, an idea also touched on by Williams, people continue to retreat back to nature as a means of healing and self reflection. Nature allows us to reconnect with the earth and be completely unburdened by normal, day-to-day worries. It is for this reason that I think man can never truly be separated into his own world.
Another point I would like to discuss (that also was mentioned in our class discussion today) was the concept of “unnatural nature.” The fact that people often have idealized, perhaps pastoral views of nature like that which Marx discussed can lead to this manmade, romanticized vision of what the earth has to provide. Williams mentioned the fact that what we refer to as “natural landscape,” like sculpted shrubs, hedges, and overly pruned and trimmed plants, is not in fact nature; they are the by-products of human efforts. In that sense, we can almost remove nature from the natural and segregate it into the world that man has retreated into. We are trying to move away and above nature, trying to improve ourselves with increasing technology and convenient inventions, yet we still attempt to enhance “the natural” as we do. Therefore, in a sense, we have created a nature that is unnatural by our attempts to progress.
Food For Thought:
- How can we begin to reintroduce and appreciate true nature into our daily lives?
- If nature has a “historical force,” is mankind driven by that same force? That is, can the history of mankind be connected to the history and evolution of nature?
- Will people ever reach a point where technology becomes too overpowering and man must resort back to a natural state?