According to the structural and post structural research around language we can come to the definition of words in this way:
Every word or term gets is value from what it is not and what it is, for example a pig is pink and big but its not a cat or a dog. A word which has value is always a part of a network of other terms and words and never exists by itself.Definition and value can only come from difference against opposite values, a game between presence and absence (interior / exterior). Our ability to act, to achieve, to communicate is being defined by this process.
When we assign value to things, we stabilize a sense of truth. Words are referring to objects and terms we share with other people. When we try to reflect on this state and try to seek self-definition of what is human we have to again create an envelope, an exterior and a frame to that term, the same we do with other values and terms. So how do we separate our self-definition from other values and make it stand in the foreground of other terms? We use terms such as nature, god, pure, death etc. these are what we use as a background for our self-definition as humans.
Most people take those terms for granted and make use of them all the time, they never contemplate their meaning to a great length. What is nature? Are we included or excluded or both? When does something stops being something natural and begins to be artificial?
The study of language has something to offer in that sense, take the word god for example : it can be the pattern that included all other patterns,the container and the origin of all other values, value itself. When we thinkabout nature we do something quite similar, it is not a value by it own but rather a container or a collection of values, a category without specific meaning of its own , it would be useless to use it without the context of humans, then it would include everything there is, it wouldn’t have any significance, it would not have a boundary because one side is empty . It is identical to the ‘god’ value as if humans were excluded, a god (category) in a universe without humans.
We see that the termnature only has meaning against the context of humans, it would be impossible to define a human being without it. Nature is what we share as humans with the rest of the world and at the same time something to point our uniqueness or what makes us different from nature. The same catalogue system that creates the term nature, being language (that assigns values), is actually not a part of nature, it is where we are different than our context. The mechanism which is responsible to determine what is natural and artificial is artificial itself , in order to justify itself it must point to itself as an entity, separate itself from the rest to get definition and value, which we can call subjectivity. What is subjectivity then? The possibility to validate or to assign a true or false value (tertium non datur) to objects, situations, it is a way to assign what we call value to things (being put in a very simple way).
Now that we discovered the root of value assignment, subjectivity, we can challenge it. We understand that values like god and nature only exist in a human context, we understand they are just support constructs to help us build our self-definition, to give value to what is human. We are confusing them with other values because they cannot be assigned with the value of true or false, from the perspective of language they are only categories than contain other references, those sub references only exists with the help of those categories (like nature-human), so you get a sort of infinitely recurring sequence (mise de abyme) which can be considered sophistry, which of course helped us understand ourselves and our boundaries, but are lacking real value themselves, which should not be assigned to them. So, if we use them like we are using the word chair or a table, or in a simplified way, we are using them in a way that would not help us go further in understanding.
Value assignment can only occur through language, it is our mental construction. Language is culturally dependent, meaning that for every culture, every person has its own collections of terms and values which are not the same personally and globally and even more they are changing in time and history. With the help of language we perceive the world around us, we assign a direction in which we progress through time, we set a destination. If we can change our basic way of how we define ourselves, we can redefine everything around us, it can be useful when we are not making the right assumptions about ourselves and our surroundings then we are bound in lack of other words – to suffer. What we perceive as wrong in some cases might be only wrong assumptions, about the core of our being.
The human / nature values could be undermined, the same applies to the word god, when we understand how we mis-use it, it is only our choice to re-define it in a way that is for us more helpful, that we can avoid misinterpretation and misjudgment, which is a gentle way to say find our way out of dogmatic thinking. We will be left without a clear definition of what is human, without the definition of nature, but we will only give up something that was never there in the first place for the hope through this understanding we will have the chance to rethink how we give meaning and create value.