Nature versus culture?

Abstract

Arnold Berleant has claimed that we get rid of the dualisms which haunted Western thinking for millennia. This paper tries to confirm his thesis by examining one of the most prominent dualisms: that of nature and culture. In antiquity, the opposition between nature and culture was not yet total, but limited and moderated. In modernity, however, nature and culture were believed to represent completely different spheres, corresponding to the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans. Contemporarily, however, undeniable entanglements between nature and culture are being put on the agenda. The future is likely to be marked by the interweaving of nature and culture.