It is well known that the word "cultura" itself emerged as an opposition to the notion of "natura" - nature. However, this opposition is not entirely correct. For man not only creates a second nature, he also changes the appearance of the first. The nature of the earth is increasingly cultivated, and the culture itself inevitably includes the natural. Nature and culture are united and inseparable, they deny and mutually enrich and complement each other.
The concept of "nature" is used in Russian in various senses. Nature is sometimes called the essence of a phenomenon. We call nature the natural environment that surrounds us directly. Finally, in the most general sense of the word "nature" is synonymous with the concept of "material world", or rather the entire material world not created by man.
Considering the question of culture and nature, nature should be understood as a set of natural conditions for the existence of human society. Nature has its own history, inseparable from the history of human society. This is the part of the world, which is developed by man and involved in the orbit of his life. In the course of the history of mankind, more and more layers of the surrounding world enter this sphere, becoming nature. Culture acts as an intermediary between nature, on the one hand, and society, on the other. The impact of society on nature, as well as the impact of the natural environment on society, is mediated by culture.
Nature and culture are inseparable. They are genetically linked, for man is the highest colour of nature's development, and culture is the greatest of man's creations. Nature is the material and soil of culture. Ultimately, all natural science is the study, the "test of nature". Nature is the oldest and most permanent object of aesthetic and artistic development.
Man feels himself a part of the big world - Nature, and at the same time he separates himself from nature, distinguishes himself from nature - the stage of its self-consciousness.
At the dawn of mankind, the fusion of man and nature has not yet been broken so much. The basis of primitive culture was the cult of nature - a man lived by nature and felt himself an integral part of it. Nature was close, because it had been drinking and feeding man, but also distant - formidable, unknown, mysterious. In the course of her practical activity there appeared a "human feeling" of nature: not only its aesthetic acceptance, but also endowing it with human qualities - humanization. It became both a workshop and a temple. For a primitive man nature was limited to a relatively narrow territory where his tribe lived.
Then there was a contradiction of the man of nature. Most likely, it happened when the corporal and spiritual were opposed to the natural as something inferior and inferior. To this was added the attitude to the nature of the naturalists of the New Age: nature is a workshop, it must be subordinated to man, "transformed" according to his interests. The utilitarian attitude to nature has led to the fact that everything has become permissible in relation to it. There were no prohibitive norms of law, religion and morality in force here. The admiration for nature disappeared. Nature began to be perceived as an antithesis of spirit and culture. In the philosophy of Marxism nature was considered as an object of production activity of man. Until now, the phrase by I.V. Michurin has been used as a model of "creative Marxism", which, by the way, was never considered by him as a certain philosophical principle: "We have nothing to wait for mercy from nature, it is our task to take them from it". Thus, the approach is contrary to the fundamental principles of folk culture, for which the land has always been a "native mother", the sacred name of the father was called rivers. Without such a love of nature, a high culture of agricultural labor is impossible. Today, people are accustomed to living on loans taken from nature, which can no longer be repaid.
Now the whole mankind stands before a new spiral - the unity of nature and culture, when all the richness of culture should be put in the service of nature protection. The unity of man and nature was understood correctly by I. Kant, for whom man is the "last goal of nature", and nature, in turn, is the "matter of all its purposes". This is the unity of nature and culture.
The mission of man is to continuously draw closer to nature, to learn more and more deeply about its laws and to make a reasonable conscious beginning in the natural element.
One of the most important, global problems on which the life or death of all mankind literally depends has become today the ecological problem - rational use of natural resources and environmental protection. The ecological crisis can be overcome only if we manage to form a human sense of nature, combining rational and emotional, aesthetic and ethical attitude to it.
From some psychophysiological experiments it follows that human reactions to some essential stimuli are slowed down in comparison with similar reactions of an animal by about one second. The reason for this delay appears to be from