2006-07 Humanities Institute Colloquium: Redefining Nature's Boundaries

Plato wrote of his teacher Socrates invoking a prayer in a grove of Attica to Pan, god of nature: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.” A few centuries later, the writer Plutarch described the announcement of the death of Pan in the heyday of the Roman Empire. Thamus, an Egyptian pilot called by a mysterious voice while at sea, is told to announce the death of the god. “Looking toward the land, he said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’ Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement.”

Today the “death of nature” is proclaimed again by various scholars and environmental writers in different ways, not only in terms of environmental crisis, but in terms of efforts to redefine essential aspects of what had been considered to be the boundaries between human and non-human realms of life: Is a distinct notion of nature apart from humanity still a valid concept? Is the human mind related enough to the larger cosmos to be able to pattern (and in a sense contain) the realities of a physical nature of which it is part, as understood in the modern scientific field of ecology? (learn more)