Quotes About Nature

Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste. If waste is the result of our indifference to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a species of culture. Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be.

Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We do not therefore consume it, or exhaust it. We simply rearrange our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity. That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste. Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature-but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden.

The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely at all. Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle. If nature will offer us no home, offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space for ourselves. We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature's vagaries.

Since the attempt to control nature is at its heart the attempt to control other persons, we can expect societies to be less patient with those cultures which express some degree of indifference to societal goals and values. It is this repeated parallel that brings us to see that the society that creates natural waste creates human waste.

This is as much as to say that nature does have a voice, and its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.

Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

When society is unveiled, when we see that it is whatever we want it to be, that it is a species of culture with nothing necessary in it, by no means a phenomenon of nature or a manifestation of instinct, nature is no longer shaped and fitted into one or another set of societal goals. Unveiled, we stand before a nature whose only face is its hidden self-origination: its genius.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

We see nature as genius when we see as genius.

We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other.

For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.

But responsibility for the garden does not mean that we can make a garden of nature, as though it were a poiema of which we could take possession. A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences. The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.

We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my script. I can not give others a voice in my script-without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.

The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human existence, disclose to the infinite player that nature is the genius of the dramatic.

The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.

If indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden. All culture has the form of gardening: the encouragement of spontaneity in others by way of one's own, the respect of source, and the refusal to convert source into resource.

The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding

There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (Heisenberg).

Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore no about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable.