Relation to the world· Nature and the livingdifficulty
Humanity's place in nature
What place should human beings hold in nature: master, guardian, or simply one member among others?
Are we the owners of a nature to exploit, the caretakers responsible for a garden entrusted to us, or one species among others with no special right? Depending on the answer, what we allow ourselves to do to forests, animals, and the climate no longer has the same limits. To take a position is to set what nature can legitimately expect of us.
Mastery
7Through knowledge and technology, human beings are called to make themselves as masters and possessors of nature, to relieve their condition and improve life. Nature is a resource to be understood and transformed in the service of humanity.
Explore this position →Baconexplicit
The Fall, for Bacon, cost humanity its dominion over creation, and science has the task of restoring it: to command nature for the relief of man's estate. But this mastery rests on a paradox that sets it apart from any naive domination: one commands nature only by obeying her, by bending to her laws in order to bend her. Know first, then constrain, and only along the grain of her own causes. Nature remains a resource to be transformed in the service of humanity, but a resource that obeys only those who have first understood her.
Novum Organum, I, §3 and §129
Descartesexplicit
Once material nature is nothing but extension governed by the laws of motion, knowing the forces of bodies as one knows a mechanism allows them to be applied to every use, medicine first of all. Descartes replaces the speculative philosophy of the Schools, which contemplates essences, with a practical philosophy that transforms: the end of knowledge is no longer to understand a given order but to harness it. Nature ceases to be a community or a mother and becomes a domain to be possessed, a programme that inaugurates the modern technological relation to the world.
Discourse on Method, VI
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Transhumanisminferable
Extending the Cartesian project of making ourselves "masters and possessors of nature", from which it drops even the prudent "as if", transhumanism stretches that mastery to human nature itself. The human is neither a mere member of the natural order to conform to, nor only its steward, but the agent called to reconfigure it and to consciously steer its own evolution: nature has no normativity, it is material to be transformed.
Descartes, Discourse on the Method, VI · More, 'A Letter to Mother Nature'
Aristotleexplicit
Nature does nothing in vain and has arranged everything for an end: plants for animals, animals for humans. This hierarchical teleology orders living things to human use, hence a clear orientation toward an anthropocentric mastery of nature.
Politics, I.8 (1256b); Physics, II.8
The Enlightenmentexplicit
In the wake of and , the current treats nature as a field to be known in order to master it and put it at the service of man: knowledge is power, and the progress of the sciences is worth the ills it relieves. Yet this conquering anthropocentrism is not without counterpoint: already contests the idea that the arts and the domestication of the world have made us better, opening a critique that will only ripen later.
Bacon, Novum Organum, book I · Buffon, Natural History
Aristotelianismexplicit
For Aristotelianism the natural order is hierarchical and goal-directed: nothing in nature is in vain, and plants exist for the sake of animals, animals for the sake of human beings. This teleological anthropocentrism, in which the rest of nature is ordered to human use, leans clearly toward mastery, without thereby denying that the human being remains a living thing within that order.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 8
Thomas Aquinasinferable
From the ordering of creatures to the human being follows a vision in which nature is entrusted to his use, but this use is framed: the human being is not an absolute owner, he administers a creation that remains God's work and bears its trace everywhere. The position leans toward mastery, but a responsible mastery, closer to stewardship than to the Promethean exploitation modernity will claim.
Summa contra Gentiles, III, 112; Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 96
Stewardship
0Humanity's technological power confers an unprecedented responsibility: to preserve nature and the conditions of an authentically human life. Humans are neither owners of the world nor mere elements of it, but its guardians.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
Member among others
8Human beings hold no privileged position in nature: they are one living being among others, embedded in a web of interdependence. All forms of life have intrinsic value, independent of their usefulness to us.
Explore this position →Taoismexplicit
Everything, up to heaven and earth, models itself on what is more original than it is, and at the end of the chain the models itself only on : the human being therefore holds no commanding place, but is one creature among others, hanging on the same order. The right place is not to subdue nature but to conform to it as one follows a slope: to claim to correct it is to think oneself wiser than what made us. Taoism thus overturns the implicit anthropocentrism of schools that make the human order, the rites and government the summit of reality.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 25 · Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (Autumn Floods)
Zhuangziexplicit
The human is neither to master nature nor to manage it as a steward: he must "let things be what they are" and tune his acting to theirs. The happiness of the fish, which Zhuangzi claims to know by watching them swim, and his sparring with over it, bespeak a lived continuity between the human and the living that makes any vantage of oversight idle. To follow the natural is neither to exploit nor to protect, but to know oneself a member of the same flux, exactly the reverse of Prometheanism.
Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (the happiness of fish) · Zhuangzi, ch. 7 (Fit for Emperors and Kings)
Laoziexplicit
"The human takes the earth as model, the earth the heavens, the heavens the Dao, and the Dao that which is so of itself": far from dominating nature, the human is set within a nesting in which he ranks after it. He is neither master nor steward charged with a mission, but one being among others called to follow the of the living. This humble inscription within the natural order brings him close to the deep ecology of Næss.
Dao De Jing, ch. 25 · Dao De Jing, ch. 51 and 64
Romanticismexplicit
The human being is not the master and possessor of a nature-object, but one voice within the great living whole: rooted in it and communing with it, it is through the feeling of this belonging, not through domination, that one comes to oneself. Against the Baconian and Cartesian project of subjecting nature, the Romantic wanderer seeks in it a mirror of the soul and the presence of the infinite; finds there one and the same spirit that sleeps in the stone and awakens in us.
Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey · Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature
Environmental Ethicsexplicit
Against the program of and , the human as "master and possessor of nature", the current refuses as the primary relation to the natural world. It divides between two answers: the human as a of a community of the living, with no privileged position, in and ; or the responsible whom their very power obliges, in .
Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1976) · Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (1979)
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Schopenhauerinferable
The same will objectifies itself by degrees in gravitation, the crystal, the plant, the animal, and man: our place in nature is not that of a master but of one grade among others of a single blind energy. This metaphysical kinship grounds direct duties toward animals and rejects the idea that man is the sovereign owner of the living.
On the Will in Nature; On the Basis of Morality, §19
Marcus Aureliusinferable
Man is no empire within an empire but a part of the cosmic whole, akin to all the beings that issue from it: being a part, he says, I shall be discontented with nothing the whole assigns me. More than master or steward of the world, Marcus sees himself as one member among others of a single great living being.
Meditations, X, 6 · Meditations, IX, 9 · Meditations, IV, 40
Rousseauinferable
Against the Baconian project of making oneself master and possessor of nature, Rousseau sets the harmony of man with a natural order whose loss makes his unhappiness. Nature is not a material to exploit but a model and a refuge; in it man is first of all a living being among others, not a sovereign.
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality · Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker
See the problem map in the Atlas →
- PrescriptiveMoral Thought experimentThe last man
If the last human being could, as he died, wipe out all remaining life with no witness, would he do wrong? Does nature have worth only for us, or does it have worth in itself, independent of any human gaze?
the living world
Sub-problems to deepen this axis's discussion
- DescriptiveA creature apart?
Is the human a being apart, held by reason and spirit above nature and bearing a singular dignity, or a living creature sprung from it, continuous with the animal and subject like it to its laws? The posture one adopts turns on this.
the human being - PrescriptiveVitalThe domination of nature
To command nature by understanding it has pushed back hunger and disease; but does the will to dominate it not turn into the domination of humankind, reducing the world to a mere stock on call? Does mastery emancipate, or does it impoverish both nature and ourselves?
nature as a resource - PrescriptiveAestheticSanctuary or garden
Should nature be left wild and untouched, preserving the part we did not make, or is the ideal a tended, gardened nature that human care completes rather than violates? And is there any "untouched" nature left to save at all?
wild nature - DescriptiveShould we follow nature?
Is nature a wise order to imitate and respect, or a blind power that crushes and starves with no regard for the good? Does calling something natural tell us anything at all about its worth?
the natural order
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptiveMoralThe suffering of wild animals
If the suffering of animals binds us, does the suffering they inflict on one another bind us too? Should we intervene against predation and the ills of nature that we did not cause, or is that to presume it falls to us to correct them?
predation in natureMoral circle - PrescriptiveMoralThe individual or the whole
Ecology values the integrity of the biotic community, even to culling the animals of an invasive species to preserve the whole: does worth lie in the whole, or in each sentient individual that such management sacrifices?
the biotic communityMoral circle - PrescriptiveVitalThe mastery of nature
Since Bacon and Descartes, technology has promised to make us "as it were masters and possessors of nature"; it has pushed back hunger and disease, but it also unleashes forces no one governs: is this half-kept mastery on its way, or contradictory in its very principle?
natureRelation to technology
Instead of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools, we may find a practical one […] and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.Descartes · Discourse on Method, VI
The human models himself on the earth, the earth on heaven, heaven on the Dao, and the Dao on itself.Laozi · Dao De Jing, ch. 25
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.Bacon · Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism 3
See how the fish come out and dart about at their ease: that is the happiness of fish!Zhuangzi · ch. 17 (Autumn Floods)