David: Welcome back to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions podcast. I’m David Gunkel, and as usual, I’m joined by my co-hosts, Leigh Johnson and Rick Lee. And today we are talking about the subject of nature. But since we find ourselves in our natural habitat at the bar, we have to begin by ordering up some drinks and asking whether we are ranting or raving. So, Leigh, I’ll go to you first. What are you drinking? And are you ranting or are you raving?

Leigh: I’m just going to have two fingers of Buffalo Trace today. And I am ranting about our delay in repairing the nation’s infrastructure. So as we’re recording this, we are just coming off of two of the worst hurricanes to hit Florida and really the entire Southeast in many, many years—Helene and Milton. There are still millions of people without power, hundreds of people dead, and hurricane season has just started. I don’t think that we can continue to put off repairing the infrastructure if we’re going to keep people alive and keep people safe for much longer, but it just seems like we’re ignoring this problem that is definitely not going away.

David: Hmm. So, Rick, you’re up next. What are you drinking, and are you ranting or are you raving?

Rick: I’m going to have a Hopwell First Pills. And today I am ranting about friend of the podcast, Ron DeSantis.

Leigh: Again, for listeners who are listening for the first time, he is not a friend of the podcast. It’s an inside joke that you are now in on.

Rick: I figured it’s been a while since I’ve ranted about my good friend Ron down there in Florida, but they have a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect reproductive rights in the state of Florida. An organization has mounted a series of ads featuring a woman who couldn’t get an abortion in Florida in order to get cancer treatment. Ron DeSantis and his health department forced them to pull the ad because they claimed it was lying about this—which it’s not. He was completely blind to the First Amendment issues involved in all of this. And so, they’re doing everything they can to make sure that this amendment doesn’t pass. And it’s nasty, and it’s dirty, and it’s ugly, but what do you expect from dear old Ronnie?

Leigh: I expect exactly that. That is exactly what I expect.

Rick: Well, he’s nothing if not predictable. David, what about you? What are you drinking and are you ranting or raving?

David: So I think I will drink the Oktoberfest brew from the Point Brewery in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. It’s not just for breakfast anymore, as we say. And I will be raving about librarians. So I just had lunch with our head librarian, and I gotta say, librarians are really at the cutting edge of what’s going on with the changes in the way that we not only curate our information but also create it. And we had a really great conversation about the large language models and about the transformations in search, and I really think librarians don’t get enough love, so I just want to make sure that we reach out and hug our librarian or talk to our librarians.

Rick: With permission, people, with permission.

David: With permission, yes. Yes, thank you. Always. They are doing some really nice work in library sciences, and I really appreciate what they do.

Leigh: Good rave. Virtual hug to all the librarians.

David: So we are talking about nature today, and Rick, this is your theme, so let us know where you want to go with it and why.

Rick: So Bette Midler throughout her career has told many jokes about Princess Margaret, and they all had the premise that Princess Margaret was ugly. One of the jokes she used to tell was, “It’s funny how much Princess Margaret enjoys nature, given what it’s done to her.” Now, leaving aside the lookism involved in this joke, it does point to something interesting about what counts as nature. There are two directions in Bette Midler’s joke. The first direction, Princess Margaret Enjoys Nature, refers to the world outside of human making. Animals, plants, forests, oceans, rivers—they’re all natural because they’re not artifacts, that is, they’re not something human-made. The second direction of the term nature indicates that it is what something is. We might say, it’s not in my nature to lie, or human nature is altruistic, or all humans, by nature, desire to know. Spinoza captures this difference by distinguishing between what he calls in Latin, natura naturans—we could translate that as naturing nature—and natura naturata, natured nature. But I think neither of these are really stable categories. Why is a bird’s nest natural while my house is artificial? What part of nature is not affected by human making and activity? And in the second sense, is the nature of anything, like humans, fixed, stable, and universal? And haven’t we seen enough critiques of essentialism to be suspicious about this use? As philosophers, it’s in our nature to get to the nature of things. So let’s get to the nature of nature.

Leigh: Poor Princess Margaret. That was brutal.

Rick: So I know I started off by saying that in both senses the term nature is an unstable category, but I’m wondering if we could try to come to some kind of definition about nature in this first direction, the other-than-human world. Could we bring some specificity to what constitutes nature?

Leigh: You know, I had a professor when I was in grad school, Denny Schmidt, who used to say of nature—contrasting it with Techne—that nature is that which appears unbidden. And I’ve always really liked that formulation.

David: Well, in the Greek tradition, it’s not nature; it’s physis, right? So it’s physis and Techne, which are opposed, which is a little different from what you get with the Latin term of nature. So etymologically, there are some differences here that, as you move back into tradition, open onto some other opportunities.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, one could say that the Greek term plays in the realm of appearing and coming out of non-being, whereas the Latin term has its origin in birth and giving birth and the process of being birthed. So they do etymologically play in different grounds. It seems like in both cases, though, Leigh’s point about the unbidden is relevant—that as much as you might try, that baby’s gonna come out. Things appear to us often without our choice, and so there does seem to be this notion of it not being called forth by us.

David: I think what’s useful here is to recognize that nature as a concept is a human construct, right? We get our idea of nature in the modern era, mainly from von Humboldt, who develops this notion of nature as being apart from the human world of culture and technology. And so in a sense, you could say that nature is an artifact of human language but also of human conceptualization of our difference from what is not us. This carries through into Donna Haraway’s work and a lot of the feminist writing on the invention of nature, as she titles her book on simians, cyborgs, and women.

Leigh: So I’m completely speaking out of turn here because I have absolutely no idea about this, but surely there must have been in other linguistic traditions, other cultural traditions, some concept of what we call nature all along. I mean, I get your point about the invention of nature in the West, but don’t you think that it has to have always been the case that human societies have had some idea of the natural world?

David: It’s interesting, because then that naturalizes the concept of nature in a way that’s problematized by this notion that it is somewhat constructed by our own attempt to think about us—what makes us different from what is not us, right? There’s a way in which nature is the other that we are imbuing with certain nonhuman capabilities or properties.

Rick: So I’m going to support Leigh a little bit in this, but I can already see what a counter-argument might be. It seems to me that the moment you put a wall around the place you’re encamped, you’re already distinguishing between a world outside of our social world. A distinction is already in play. And I’m not sure that’s quite yet a concept. You know, the moment I put a fence around the fort, I’m not sure I have a concept of nature.

David: When you go into the thought of our friends in Enlightenment Inc., they had this notion of the state of nature—the state of nature being some primordial prehistorical position of the first human in the natural state. But it’s a construct. It is a conceptual idea that is utilized to ground a lot of the work on politics and the human social environment that develops through the Enlightenment era.

Rick: But I think that points to something that we’re all kind of getting at. David, earlier when referring to von Humboldt, you used the word culture. And I’ve used the words society or the social a couple of times, and it seems like in this case, what we’re referring to is something outside of either culture—as if that’s a well-defined concept—or outside the social. I think it’s also interesting that in English, we use the word culture to cultivate crops. There, too, would be a difference between nature. So, again, I think we’re back to the unbidden. When I cultivate corn, I’m calling it forth, but if corn grows wildly, that comes without me calling it forth. We’re dealing with two contrasts that might be related: one contrast is nature as that which is not made by humans, and the second is nature as that which is not culture or social.

David: Let me push back on this a little bit. What if the not made by humans is entirely a human fabrication? Like, what if the concept of the not made by humans is something that we construct as a way of defining our difference from something that we then other in the process of conceptualizing this not-made-by-human?

Leigh: Well, I guess I have a question about that. Is the construction there so that we can enact this separation, or are you suggesting that the construction is artificial in the sense of not true? So, do you think that we do construct nature?

David: Yeah, I would say it’s not artificial in terms of not true, right? I mean, it’s artificial in terms of it being a fabrication that we impose on being as a way of parsing what we then call reality, that there is this world of human culture and society. And then, other from that, is nature as this binary opposite. So I think we’re dealing with a very primordial Western binary, this nature-culture division that plays out not only in Greek metaphysics but also in the Enlightenment and beyond.

Leigh: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that’s absolutely true. I suppose just to get back to Rick’s question—what exactly is that beyond? You know, we could say that it’s the unbidden, it’s the not made, it’s not artifice, it’s not Techne. It has an order, but it’s also mysterious. I’m guessing this is what Rick was trying to get at and not just, like, let’s list the things of nature, like plants and oceans and mountains.

Rick: And trees and birds.

David: But it’s interesting, in the way that you characterized it just now, Leigh, you had to do so negatively.

Leigh: Exactly.

David: Not this, not that. And so it is something characterized by us as the other, as negative, as being different from. And that is part of the cut that is made in the fabric of being.

Rick: Following from that is also something I mentioned at the beginning, namely that if we don’t take for granted this distinction, then things become a lot more complex in such a way that I think we can then begin to see the role that humans play in the climate and in environmental systems. In other words, to use the example I used in the introduction: we talk about a bird’s nest as something natural, but we don’t talk about my house as something natural. You know, the birds didn’t make the sticks and leaves and whatever else they’re making their nest out of any more than whoever built my house made the wood. Somewhere along the way, it’s all nature, then—other natural things doing some manipulation. I mean, why isn’t a plant turning nutrients in the soil into seeds artificial? And this might go back to support your point, David, about Enlightenment, Inc. I suspect that somewhere at the bottom is something about either choice or reason or a combination of the two. That is, I can design a house; I can choose to put it here or there in ways that it seems like plants and animals don’t.

Leigh: Or agency.

Rick: Yeah.

Leigh: And I think this is most obvious in the distinction between physis and Techne. So, for listeners, when we’re using the Greek word physis, that’s spelled P-H-Y-S-I-S—that’s where we get the word physics. Physis is nature, Techne is made things (where we get the word technology). And I think one of the reasons that we don’t say, for example, that the apple tree made the apple, is because we think that freedom doesn’t exist in nature. Things that are made are made by choice, by technique, quite literally. So we don’t think that nature operates that way.

David: But it’s interesting that in order for nature to come into being, we have to posit a maker, right? In Judeo-Christian traditions, you have God who creates, who is the maker of all of these things that we then call natural. So there’s a way in which the stories that we’ve told ourselves to explain the origin of nature already situate us in artifice. It’s kind of like the writing-speech dichotomy in Derrida, right? There’s a writing before speech versus writing. There is artifice in the stories we tell about the origin of the difference between nature and human artifice, and that is anchored in the theological concept of God.

Leigh: Well, I want to push back on that because there are certainly other ways of explaining nature that don’t require a designer.

David: Oh, yeah.

Leigh: And there are even other ways of talking about nature that entirely conflate the designer with nature. I mean, that’s Spinoza, right?

David: Right.

Rick: Yeah.

Leigh: God or nature.

Rick: I think in an interesting way, if I posit, for example, an event like what comes to be called the Big Bang, there I’m pointing to, I guess, in a way an origin. But I think we would have to say that origin is natural in the sense I think Leigh was pointing out. We don’t say that whatever banged was intentional, that it was sitting there and it’s like, all right, today I’m going to bang. So there are completely natural ways to account for the origin of nature.

Leigh: And I want to stick on this agency issue for just a minute, because I think there are other things that it implies. One, that there is an order to nature, but that order is neither political nor moral. So often people will say things like, whatever is natural is necessary, right? We don’t blame the lion for attacking the—whatever it is that lions attack—antelope. I don’t know, whatever’s out on the Serengeti.

Rick: Other nature things.

Leigh: Right, other nature things. We don’t hold those things morally responsible because we say there is an order to nature. There are predators and prey. You know, when weeds take over my garden, they’re not morally responsible for taking over my garden, nor is there any kind of political order to the relationship between those plants and the weeds and the sun and the water. We believe that agency and freedom—or at least in the West and the post-Enlightenment tradition—are absent in nature, and that means agency is absent in nature.

David: But it does get to the point that what is declared to be natural is already a political decision. Someone with the power to say, nature is this way; it is in the nature of the beast to be in this manner or that manner. It wasn’t too long ago that homosexuality was considered unnatural, right? I mean, these are ways in which we have manipulated this in order to gain power over other members of the human community by aligning our values with nature. And that, I think, is really where the politics comes into the conversation.

Leigh: Right, but again, that’s our politics. There is no politics in nature.

Rick: Although, like in any natural law morality, I think the attempt is always made to say—and David, I think you were pointing to this—that a good bit of our values are actually written right into nature, and that would be artificial. And so, I mean, my pointing to it as artificial is to agree with Leigh that if you’re not a natural law ethicist, you’re going to say there is no morality in nature. There is no politics in nature.

Leigh: And this may be a nitpicky point, but even if you are a natural law ethicist, I don’t think that what you’re saying is this morality is written into nature. I think you’re saying that in order to be moral, my values have to align with nature. I still wouldn’t say that when the wolf eats one of its cubs, that that’s immoral.

Rick: For sure.

David: Right.

Leigh: Although if you, Rick or David, eat one of your cubs, I’m going to say that that’s immoral. I wish you’d stop doing it.

Rick: I don’t have any cubs, so that’s why I’m hungry all the time.

Leigh: But just to get back to the point, I think to say that we can ground a morality in nature is not the same as saying that there is a morality in nature, or that the natural world, the natural order, is a moral order.

Rick: I take your point, and it makes me realize that I was relying too heavily on the natural law morality of Thomas Aquinas, who would say that the reason why nature could be a moral guide—and this goes back to a point David made earlier—is because God is the author of nature. That’s where I got this language of “morality is written into nature.” But there are, strangely enough, contemporary natural law ethicists who will abandon all of that. And I think then, Leigh, your point is quite right.
Can I give you an example, though, that tickles me from Thomas Aquinas’ morality and nature?

So he’s talking about why adultery is immoral. He’s confronting the obvious fact that by and large, most animals are promiscuous—they’re having sex left and right with a new antelope or whatever every time. And he realizes that there’s no law against adultery written into nature. Aha! Except there is, because he says there are two kinds of animals. On the one hand, there are animals like dogs. In dogs, you need only one of the parents, the mother, in order to nurture and raise the offspring. And so they could be promiscuous. But there are other animals, like birds, that require both parents in order to nurture and raise the offspring, and they are not promiscuous. And we humans, obviously, are more like the birds than the dogs.

Now, what’s amazing about this obviousness that we’re more like birds than dogs is that we are mammals. So he points to the dogs in terms of the mother being able to provide food for the offspring, and human mothers can also do the same thing. But then he goes on to say, no, the reason why two parents are required is because, yes, the mother could feed the offspring, but the father has to educate the offspring. And what I love about this is it shows a moment in which there is an implicit admission that this is not a natural law morality. Because I need a social concept like education in order to make this whole thing work. Otherwise, nature would tell even the humans, “go out and be fruitful and multiply with whomever.”

Leigh: Yeah. I also want to point out another implication of this, again, Western conception of nature as being necessary and not involving agency or freedom. We can’t hold nature responsible; therefore, we can’t punish it and we can’t be angry at it. That’s very frustrating for us, right? I mean, I want to be mad at hurricanes. I want to be mad at viruses. I want to be mad at aging. I want to be angry; I want to punish some of these things, but I can’t. And that, I think, reinforces our belief that there is a real deep metaphysical ontological separation between the kinds of beings that we are and the rest of nature, despite the fact that of course we must recognize that we also are natural beings.

Rick: Yeah, and I think this is most obvious in Kant, who basically says there are two realms: there’s the realm of nature and there’s the realm of freedom. Right, and never the twain shall meet. You know, even within his thought there’s a certain, again, implicit pointing to the fact that this distinction is untenable. But I still fucking hate COVID.

Leigh: One last point, I promise, and I’ll get off of this freedom thing—actually, I take it back, I’m never gonna get off this freedom thing. But one last point is that it becomes especially problematic for non-human animals, like those things that are not trees and hurricanes but also not human beings. Frequently we see in a lot of non-human animals—elephants, dolphins, some advanced apes—behaviors that appear very much to us to look like reason and agency and freedom, and even morality in many cases. And the only way that we don’t know that that’s what those things are is, of course, because we don’t share language with non-human animals. They can’t explain to us why they’re doing what they’re doing, if there even is a why. And I think that’s where, for me, to get back to Rick’s original question, like, what is this nature in the first sense? Well, it’s easy to say, okay, it’s trees, oceans, mountains, lakes, stars, etc. But it’s harder to say, elephants and dolphins and advanced apes in the exact same way.

Rick: And I think to raise Donna Haraway’s name again, one of her arguments, particularly about the issue of aggression related to primates, is that one of the reasons why we say that animals aren’t free, even dolphins and octopi and so on, is ultimately because they’re not human.

Leigh: Right.

Rick: And I think there is no further argument than that. I think that shows the way in which this distinction is, at best, a porous one, and at worst, untenable.

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Rick: Earlier, David, you used as an example the fact that people used to say that something like homosexuality is unnatural. And I’m wondering if that’s based on this first notion of nature that we’ve been talking about, or if it’s based rather on what I called the second direction of nature—namely, there’s something called human nature. This thing, this behavior, this activity does not follow from that nature. And therefore it’s unnatural, just as it would be unnatural for humans to fly or a scorpion not to sting a frog. And so I’m wondering if an example like that doesn’t either slip into the other direction or maybe show the fundamental relation between these two notions of nature.

David: I like that last point of showing the fundamental relationship between these two ideas of nature, because I think that’s at play there. There is an appeal to something bigger that is an authority that we can point to and say, it’s not natural and we should follow nature. But it also appeals to this notion of the correct human nature—that we need to be a particular way to accord ourselves with nature. And then that is the definition of what human nature is. But all these terms, natural versus unnatural, allow for a great deal of expressions of not only values, but also of politics. By being able to declare something unnatural, we’re able to marginalize entire sets of human populations, entire behaviors of human beings. Behaviors that would be in our human nature can then therefore be declared as being unnatural, and therefore needing to be either suppressed or repressed, as the case may be.

Leigh: So to immediately go back on my promise from before, I would like to talk about freedom again here.

David: That’s a different episode.

Leigh: I’m sorry! But I just want to say, for my part, that I hate talk about human nature. Period. Full stop. And I am willing to admit, as unpopular as it may be, that that is because I do believe that human beings are free. Now, I’m a fallibilist about this—I think it’s entirely possible that we could find out at some point in the future that we’re just wound-up clocks, and that we can trace a series of causes and effects through chemistry or neurology or whatever, and explain everything that we do. And if there are in fact no choices made, I allow for that possibility. However, it is nevertheless the case that our experience of ourselves is that we’re free. And so I think that when people say, “X is human nature,” that is almost in every case an exercise of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls bad faith.

And we did an episode on bad faith not too long ago. We’ll leave a link in the show notes for this episode about it. But basically, Sartre’s argument is that to say that you are a thing, like a table is a table or a chair is a chair, is to flee your responsibility. And I think that all arguments about human nature more or less amount to that.

Rick: I think I agree with you on that, Leigh. I thought for a moment you were going to go in a slightly different direction.

Leigh: But I freely went in my own direction.

David: No, you were drawn by your nature to move in that direction. Please keep these things distinct.

Rick: Well, let me give an example. And then I think my example, in fact, shows that I am agreeing with you. I don’t know if you all ever teach Marx or Marxism in any of your classes.

Leigh: Oh, you know we do.

David: That’s all we teach, right?

Rick: But it’s inevitable, almost a necessity, that some student is going to say, “Well, this doesn’t work because humans by nature are greedy,” or “humans by nature are self-interested.” I think there is a moment here where it’s clearly the positing of a value rather than an argument. This appeal to “it’s just the nature of humans” is another way of saying, “I’m not going any further. I’m not talking about this anymore. There’s nothing else to be said about it. I’m done here.” In an interesting way, this argument often raised against Marx is also an argument against freedom in the way you’ve been talking about it, Leigh. That is, I cannot not be self-interested. If I were not self-interested, I wouldn’t be a human—or at least not a good one. So, I thought you were going to move more in that direction, about how these appeals to nature can serve as ways to stop inquiry. But I think that amounts to the same thing you were saying about treating oneself as a thing—it’s another way of stopping inquiry. Because if I’m a table, then I’m just going to “table,” right? And I can’t do anything but “table.”

Leigh: And look how convoluted your arguments have to get to justify saying, for example, that human beings are “by nature” self-interested. I always say to students when they bring this up, “Explain to me how the first infant ever survived if humans are by nature self-interested.” And, of course, they’ll respond, “Well, because the mother—or the mother and father—wanted to keep the species alive.” And I’m like, you’re twisting yourself into too many pretzels to make that sort of argument. If you’re self-interested, the last thing you’re going to do is care for the most needy part of nature ever invented—infants—over yourself.

Rick: And also, it’s not in my self-interest to further the species.

Leigh: Exactly.

Rick: I fail to see how I have a vested interest in the continuation of the species.

Leigh: But again, I think this goes to your point, which is that the argument is intended to stop any further inquiry. It’s not actually meant to investigate the actual conditions we’re discussing or to draw conclusions that align with those conditions. Instead, it’s just to say, “Here are all the arguments you can no longer make, because I’ve put up this wall that says, ‘This is the nature of human beings.’ Anything inconsistent with that is just not going to be considered.”

David: It serves a theological role in a way. In earlier times, you might have said, “It’s God’s will that things be this way,” and that would put an end to the argument. Now, appealing to “nature” serves as a kind of transcendental authority. “This is what it is by nature,” and therefore, we don’t need to argue about it anymore because it “just is.” And I think it functions in a similar way to an appeal to divine authority.

Rick: And to appeal to nature in that way is to insist that the nature of a thing is fully available to me and to us. But I want to question that: to what extent is the nature of something fully accessible? We don’t possess that capacity.

Leigh: I also want to address a few anticipated objections to this, so I can imagine someone saying, “Well, there are certain biological facts about me that I don’t choose.” And that’s absolutely true. If anything is intrinsic to human nature, it’s that we’re born, we’re embodied, and we die. That’s pretty much it. For example, I have type 1 diabetes. I might say, “I have to take insulin; it’s in my biology. I’m not choosing to do that.” But of course, I am choosing to do that, right? I’m choosing to live every day that I take insulin, as opposed to not taking insulin. People might also say that some people have a biological predisposition towards alcoholism, for example. That’s true—there are certain biological indicators that might make you more predisposed to certain kinds of addictive behaviors. But that’s still not the same thing as saying you have to be an alcoholic, right? There are still choices. So even when people want to say, “It’s in human nature to be X,” I would prefer they say, “Humans have a tendency to be X,” but also acknowledge that even given those tendencies, choices remain.

David: So, Leigh, I want to ask you a question and bring up our good friend in Enlightenment Inc., Immanuel Kant. Would you say that it is in our nature to be free?

Leigh: That’s an interesting question. If by “in our nature to be free” you simply mean “we are free,” then yes, I would agree—again, with the caveat that that might not be true, but it’s my understanding. But if you mean it’s “in our nature to be free,” as in we choose to be free, I don’t think we choose to be free.

Rick: Hmm.

David: So then, would you say that freedom is grounded in a natural necessity?

Leigh: Well, I mean, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is that’s an incredibly convoluted formulation, right? To say “it’s necessary that you’re free.”

Rick: Right. And it seems to me that we get to this notion of nature because one of the main philosophical questions, or tools, we use is to ask “why.” Aristotle points out that this is pretty much what philosophy does—it’s confronted with something that exists and then asks why. At a certain moment, one might realize there is no end to this question. And there could be a certain experience of what Adorno calls “vertigo” at this point, because if we can’t get to the bottom of why, then we’re left with a sense of meaninglessness. There’s no reason for anything, and so on. To say “it’s human nature” is a way of providing an ultimate answer and avoiding this vertigo that might just be an aspect of human experience that we’re attempting to flee. So I think if someone claims that humans are free by nature, that’s a way of answering “why are humans free?” It sounds different from just saying, “Well, because they’re free,” which sounds like a non-answer. But somehow, “they’re free by nature” sounds like an answer, though I think they amount to the same thing.

Leigh: Let’s also not forget that we ascribe a different kind of freedom to nature and natural things as well. It’s not agency, but we frequently say things like, “birds are free,” or “the forest is free.” My current backyard lawn is “free” until I get out there and tame it again. That doesn’t exactly map onto positive and negative freedoms as we normally talk about them, but we do ascribe a kind of freedom to nature that is not agential but is purely “free.”

There’s a kind of freedom to necessity, right? If something has to be, it can’t be restricted.

David: Right

Rick: Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah, I work a lot on Hobbes, and he has a very meager and simple definition of freedom—simply not being bound. And he means that physically, like I can move my limbs, I can walk, I can punch, and so on. That’s the only meaning of freedom, and other than that, there is no intelligible meaning of freedom according to Hobbes. In that case, nature is free, and maybe birds most of all, because they can move three-dimensionally in ways that we can’t—well, unless we’re falling. So I think there is a freedom that nature has, but it’s a very minimal freedom in that sense.

Leigh: Well, it’s minimally agential. It’s not minimal.

Rick: I see. Yeah, that’s a good point. I agree with that. It’s minimally agential. And by “minimal freedom,” I just mean something purely negative, like the old distinction. A notion of negative freedom is to say, well, you’re not bound or restricted, but a positive notion of freedom would be something like “freedom for” or having the capability to do something.

Leigh: Yeah, maybe a good example here would be to say, if it’s in the nature of human beings to be self-interested, that’s a restriction on human beings. But if it’s in the nature of apple trees to grow apples, that’s positive, right? That’s a freedom—a necessary freedom.

Rick: Somehow, in the back of my mind, I have that scene from The Life of Brian where he’s preaching, and he says, “Well, take a look at the birds.” And someone in the audience goes, “There he goes again, having another go at the birds.”

Leigh: But back to this “in the nature of” question. I do think that we often say things like, “It’s in the nature of the scorpion to sting the frog.” And we mean that differently than we mean “it’s in the nature of human beings to be self-interested.” Actually, I take that back—people who say “it’s in the nature of human beings to be self-interested” mean it in the same way as “it’s in the nature of the scorpion to sting the frog.” I think they’re wrong about that.

Rick: Yeah. And this is where the notion of freedom gets complex. I think Kant hints at this—that when we talk about freedom, we’re talking about something that determines our action. When we talk about the nature of the scorpion, we’re also talking about something that determines its action, but the way the determining happens is radically different—or so one might argue. There’s a weird way in which we point to freedom as the determinant of our actions, as if to say, “My freedom determines what I did.”

Leigh: So I have a question for you guys, and this goes back to the second sense of nature we’re discussing: “It’s in the nature of X to do or be X.” I obviously don’t think it makes sense to say it’s in the nature of human beings to be or do anything in particular. But I often say, for example, about systems that it’s “in the nature” of the system to express or accomplish X, or have a certain effect. I completely agree that it’s in the nature of capitalism to exploit workers, and I think it’s in the nature of democracy to be, as Derrida said, “self-deconstructing.” So it’s a different way of talking about the nature of something—different from how we talk about the nature of nature and the nature of free human beings.

David: And it’s interesting because that ascribes a nature to something that is an artifact. Like saying “it’s in the nature of capitalism.” We invented capitalism.

Rick: Shut your mouth.

David: Oh yeah, okay. Sorry, sorry.

Rick: It’s as natural as the tree outside my window.

David: Right—because by nature, we’re self-interested, right?

Rick: [Laughing] Right! Because we’re self-interested, David.

David: I think it shows how this binary distinction between the natural and the artificial is already contaminated—by the artificial leaking into the natural and the natural leaking into the artificial. It’s already self-deconstructing that opposition.

Leigh: I like that word, “contaminated.” And just to get into one of your areas of expertise, David, I think a lot of people today would say it’s in the nature of LLMs, or large language models, to hallucinate.

David: Right?

Leigh: I’m not sure it’s in the nature of AI to hallucinate.

Rick: Right?

Leigh: It’s certainly the case right now. But by saying “it’s in the nature of AI to hallucinate,” we’re cutting off certain discussions.

David: And when we say it, it’s a normative claim. We’re saying that this is the normal way this thing functions. So, going back to what Rick said, it’s a way of putting an end to inquiry, a way to plug that hole so you don’t spin into that abyss of endlessly asking why.

Leigh: Yeah.

Rick: Right. AI is a really interesting example because we might say that any organism—plant or animal—is, in a way, a system. What’s interesting about natural systems is that their parts are interrelated in ways that are incredibly fluid and subject to change. We can’t always, or maybe even often, predict the outcome of the next state of that system. In artificial systems, however, we tend to think we know exactly how the parts interrelate, that it’s set by rules, and so on. But AI is an interesting example here. I would have said 20 years ago that if an algorithm did something unexpected, that was a bug. I don’t think you can say that anymore, which shows that even artificial systems are taking on something we might call natural.

Leigh: I agree with you. What’s especially interesting with the emergence of large language models is how they engage with language itself. I think many of us would agree that there’s a nature to mathematics—although I’m sure mathematicians out there are screaming at us right now! But there is something intrinsic about it. Similarly, I’d say it’s in the nature of language to auto-deconstruct. As Derrida argued, there will always be traces, remainders, and margins. To say that it’s in the nature of language to auto-deconstruct is like saying it’s in the nature of humans to be free. It’s a weird way to talk about something’s nature.

Rick (voiceover): Hey, Hotel Bar Sessions listeners! This is Rick Lee. Do you know what kind of pillow I use or mattress I sleep on? No? That’s because we don’t do any of those silly ads for pillows or mattresses or any other crap you don’t want. We’re supported by you, our listeners! So, if you want to keep our late-night conversations flowing, why not do the equivalent of buying us a drink or giving us a high five? You can subscribe to our podcast on Patreon—that’s patreon.com/hotelbarsessions—at any level you feel comfortable with. And hey, there are perks! You could get a coffee mug, a shout-out on an episode, or even early access to new episodes. We really could use your help, so check out patreon.com/hotelbarsessions. Meanwhile, we’ll see you back at the bar.

Rick: So we’ve spent quite some time beating up on the concept of nature and showing how unstable it is in both senses. But I wonder if we might want to pause or hesitate before completely eliminating it. One big reason I’m thinking about is that we might need a concept like nature to confront the climate catastrophe that humans have been contributing to for a long time. I think we need to be able to say something like, “We humans have been doing something to something other than us.” Maybe this is just a strategic point, but I’m wondering if there’s some reason to hold onto this concept as if it were more stable.

David: I think this is where von Humboldt’s work has actually been helpful. In German Romanticism and Idealism, he introduced this concept of nature as an “other” that deserves respect. This notion could be central to addressing the climate crisis, because resolving it will require respecting nature, whatever we decide that means, as part of addressing the impacts of the crisis—not only on humans but on the entirety of what we call nature.

Leigh: What’s really interesting about the debate surrounding the current climate crisis is that it draws on both senses of nature we’ve discussed today. On one hand, you have climate change deniers who argue, “It’s just in the nature of nature to have these cycles—things get hotter, things cool down, the weather fluctuates. That’s just nature.” On the other hand, you have climate affirmers—also known as reasonable people—who say, “No, there’s a difference between physis and techne, and what we’ve been doing—what we’ve been making—is negatively affecting the natural world.” Until we stop making things that harm the environment or start making them in better ways, we’re going to keep harming nature and suffering the consequences. I sometimes worry that conflating these two senses of nature is most pronounced when it comes to confronting the climate crisis.

Rick: Yeah, that’s such an important point because climate change deniers sometimes argue, “Wait a second—we’re part of nature too! So, we’re not doing anything unnatural by producing too much carbon.” They’ll say, “You don’t blame lions for overhunting on the Serengeti, so why blame humans for altering the climate?” This argument plays on the difficulty in distinguishing between techne and nature, or between technology and nature in a broader sense. But at the same time, I want to push back and say, “Hold on—it’s crucial for us to make that distinction if we want to drive action toward solving this crisis.”

Leigh: And just to complicate things even more, there’s division even among people who acknowledge that climate change is real—let’s call them the reasonable folks. Some say, “We know what damage we’re causing, and we know its sources. We need to stop doing those things.” Then there’s another camp saying, “We’re such good technologists; let’s just wait for tech solutions to fix everything.” That, to me, is a huge problem. This isn’t a “wait and see” situation—it’s an “oh no, we’re already 20 years too late” kind of crisis. I’m especially worried that as AI keeps advancing, people will think, “Oh, AI will save us from climate change too.” This kind of thinking just shows how deep the crisis of waiting on tech solutions has become.

Rick: Right, it reminds me of situations where humans have introduced non-native species into an ecosystem to try to fix a problem, only to end up creating a bigger one. They’ll realize, “Oh, we’ve devastated this ecosystem; let’s bring in another species to prey on the first,” but that just makes things worse in ways they didn’t anticipate. So, before saying, “Let’s throw more technology at this,” maybe we should pause and consider our track record.

David: Exactly. It’s worth recognizing how much of what we call “nature” is actually cultivated by us to fit our concept of nature. We’ll set up bird bans, for example, to protect endangered species, or we’ll plant native species to replace invasive ones—all in the name of “making nature more natural.” It’s ironic: we’re doing so much intervention, using technology to make nature look like nature. It just shows how intertwined and even contaminated these two concepts—nature and technology—have become.

Rick: That’s why I find those speculative shows on what Earth would look like without humans so fascinating. It imagines a world where nature reclaims everything, growing and evolving without any human intervention.

David: And it’s revealing to consider what parts of nature we select as “natural” and try to preserve. Going back to German idealism, Hegel said nature is responsible for producing deviations or “monsters.” We try to eliminate or downplay what we consider monstrous, aiming instead to cultivate a “perfect” version of nature that fits our standards.

Leigh: I think it’s crucial, though, that we don’t keep nature in this mysterious or monstrous realm. We really need scientific insights—the laws of nature, its patterns, and tendencies—to understand how to mitigate the damage we’ve done to the environment. Look at the 2025 project, which is set to eliminate the National Weather Service. That’s a terrifying idea. We rely on that data, not only for safety but for understanding how nature itself is evolving.

Rick: That reminds me of a conversation I saw at a conference about Derrida’s idea of justice and incalculability. To be just, Derrida argues, justice must confront the incalculable, because any calculation would impose a limit that may actually cause injustice. Someone in the audience countered, “Everything you’ve said could be championed by the George W. Bush administration. Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Undecidable. Do humans impact the climate? Undecidable. So, let’s not worry about it.” That Derridean then proposed: “Calculate the hell out of everything calculable, and then recognize where undecidability begins.”

Leigh: Right? Millions of people were undoubtedly grateful for early warnings about recent hurricanes like Helene and Milton. We absolutely need that information, not just for human safety but to understand how nature itself is shifting.

David: It’s true that climate action is often framed anthropocentrically, as something necessary for human survival. But some radical environmental philosophers argue we should think more broadly—that we need to heal the planet for its own sake, not just for us. This means seeing nature not merely as an instrument for human ends but as something deserving of respect and preservation on its own terms.

Leigh: You know, when I was a kid, my grandmother would constantly complain about kudzu. I don’t know if you have it in your part of the world, but it’s an invasive plant that pretty much takes over everything once it’s introduced into an environment. In Tennessee, you can drive along the highway for a quarter- or even a half-mile and see nothing but kudzu. Everything is covered by it. Now, kudzu isn’t native to North America—it’s originally from Japan. Someone had to bring it here. And following up on David’s point about how we’re going to navigate the environmental crisis we’re in, part of that involves our conceptual frameworks. How do we understand the difference between physis and techne? How do we understand the distinction between the natural world and what we’re making or doing to that world?

But it’s also about dealing with the history of things we’ve already done. God bless Gen Z—they understand this better than anyone. They know we can’t just say, “Oh, we’ll be more environmentally sensitive.” There’s already been so much damage done. We have to think carefully about how to meet this challenge, and that includes reckoning with our concepts of nature, our understanding of our own history, and how we talk to each other about what is or isn’t the case. We need to halt the kind of invasive overgrowth of harmful ideas and practices.

Rick: And it seems to me that some of our historical concepts of nature, including the ones David was talking about earlier, are implicated in the climate catastrophe we’ve created. These concepts either permit—or don’t even question—the domination of nature, or in some cases, they outright encourage it. That thinking is partly why we’re in this mess. And Leigh, what you’re pointing out is that we need a concept of nature that actually values nature for itself.

Leigh: Exactly. And I have to say, I’m saying this as someone who really hates nature.

Rick: I fucking hate nature.

Leigh: I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m definitely not a camper. I’m not the kind of person who wants to get out and take a walk in the woods.

Rick: Nope. Hard pass.

Leigh: So, if I can get on board with this, you can too.

David: Exactly. You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to care about the environment.

Rick: Exactly.

David: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, as always. We could go all evening, but it’s in the nature of our bartender to want to go camping.

Leigh: Be free, bartender.

Rick: Be like the birds.

Leigh: Or, better yet, get an Airbnb.

David: So, she’s going to pull the plug on our conversation, and we’ll have to reconvene as we do every week with a new episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. Thanks, everyone.

Leigh: I just want to say this has been really helpful for me. I hadn’t thought carefully enough about a lot of these issues, and I really appreciate both of your insights.

Rick: Same here. You know, it’s in our nature to overstay last call, but—

Leigh: Would you two please stop saying that it’s in our nature?

Rick: It’s in your nature to tell us to stop.

Leigh: Well, I’m freely telling you to stop.