The social bearing of nature

This essay examines how nature pertains to social life. Part I describes th e social ontology the essay employs to address this issue. This ontology is of the site variety and is opposed to ontologies of both the individualist and socialist sorts. Part II describes where nature appears in this ontolo gy. Artifacts are differentiated from nature, and much of 'nature' is shown to be second nature, a type of artifact that looks and feels like nature. Part II concludes by disputing the idea that nature forms a backdrop agains t which society develops semi-autonomously. Pat III examines the idea of hu man history as a natural history. Opposing construals of natural history th at treat human-social existence as a piece of nature, it defends the necess ity of maintaining distinctions between social life and nature and between social history and natural change. None the less, it continues, human histo ry is a natural history. These claims are held together via a neo-Marxian c onception of human natural history as the development of humankind through its entanglement with nature. Elements of the 'metabolism' of humankind wit h nature are described.