What images of nature have guided our attitude toward our environment? What differences exist between physis and natura? How has a conception of “human nature” reduced to history or reason been constituted? Is it possible to cultivate an imaginary capable of guiding our sensitive and affective, conscious and rational experience of the now torn relationships between man and nature? Can we think of nature as living nature or subject of law without necessarily being a person?

This book is based on the study of the image, not only conceptual, but also affective of nature. Not from the rational concept of scarce, mute, inert, impersonal nature, but from the experience of nature in the life of man, or of man as part of nature and dependent on it, house, shelter, comfort, food or “structure of reception” (Ll. Duch). The perspective of the hermeneutics of the imagination that we assume here, by placing the emphasis on the mnemohistorical level of culture, puts on the table that destructive violence against nature runs parallel to repressive violence against men and that exercised by the individual. on himself by having internalized a split image of the nature-culture unity. This approach converges with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Félix Guattari and, especially, with Philippe Descola, when he points out that anthropology - the science of man - is faced with an enormous challenge: either disappear as an exhausted form of humanism; or metamorphose and rethink its field and its tools, to include in its object, much more than the anthropos, the entire natural collectivity of existing linked to it and relegated today to a mere deposit of exploitable resources.

The set of essays gathered here works on three levels: the mythical conception of nature in ancient cultures; the philosophical conception of nature and its recreation in the arts; and the imaginaries of nature in the face of the challenges of the ecological transition.