ABSTRACT
Nature’s holism is portrayed in terms of definable entities embedded in a web of causal or probabilistic law-governed biophysical interdependencies. There are many senses of the idea of “nature” and of what is “natural”, and many criticisms concerning their integrity. This chapter aims to draw together some key strands of the idea of a transcendent nature and its way of “being” by considering the idea of nature’s selfhood, for the moment, and having responded to some important criticisms of the notion. Nature is what the word “nature” mean in the context of some ongoing text. Nature is not essentially an energy system, nor a deterministic causal network, nor an instantiation of abstract laws. Instantiations of what one might term the “essencing” of essences in nature can be foregrounded in works of art. When nature is perceived as purely a resource, any adverse consequences of exploiting it appear simply as needing to be fixed by either current or future technologies.
