The Return to Nature and Culture

In his lecture, Tim Ingold argues for a renewed humanism oriented toward the flourishing of life rather than the pursuit of progress. In response to contemporary ecological and social crises, he rethinks humanity’s place in the world and the responsibilities that come with it.

For the past three centuries, the Western world has been guided by a doctrine of progress, first articulated by philosophers of the European Enlightenment, according to which the destiny of humanity is to exercise dominion over the rest of creation. This doctrine has underwritten developments in science and technology that have improved the lives of millions, yet it has also entailed mounting social injustice and environmental degradation. Far from delivering humanity to a promised land of peace and plenty, three hundred years of progress leave us instead looking into an abyss.

In hindsight, it is clear that Enlightenment humanism took a wrong turn when it declared that the proper vocation of human beings lay not in following in the footsteps of their ancestors—aligning their lives with the manifold other beings with whom they once coexisted—but in turning their backs on these creaturely ways to face resolutely in the opposite direction.

This lecture makes the case for undoing that fatal turn. Rather than joining posthumanist critics in rejecting the concepts of nature and culture—and even of humanity itself—as inventions of modernity, it seeks to restore these concepts in their premodern senses. Nature is understood here as a power, distributed throughout the cosmos, to give birth to new life, while culture refers to the burden of nurture: the work of creating conditions in which newly born life can flourish.

Thanks to the gift of language, humans, Tim Ingold argues, bear a responsibility for life’s flourishing that is wholly exceptional. Recognizing this responsibility, rather than pretending to deny it, is essential if it is to be exercised wisely.