Humanity's place in nature

Hegel understands nature as the Idea in the form of otherness: not as a reality devoid of meaning before human intervention, but as a manifestation of reason that is not yet free. In practical terms, he grants the person the absolute right to appropriate external things and to place his will in them, since the thing has no end in itself. The analysis of labour shows how the servile consciousness, by forming the object, gains a new relation to itself. These texts favour mastery, and establish no mission to preserve nature.

Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §247-251 · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §44 · Phenomenology of Spirit, IV, A ("Lordship and Bondage")

God gave the earth to men for their support and convenience, "to the use of the industrious and rational", and Locke justifies its appropriation by labour, which multiplies its economic value: land left uncultivated yields next to nothing. His argument thus favours the productive improvement of nature, not its preservation for its own sake. The initial limits protect other people, by forbidding one to let appropriated goods spoil and by requiring that "enough, and as good" be left for others; the introduction of money then allows unequal holdings beyond immediate needs.

Second Treatise of Government, ch. V, §26-37 · Second Treatise of Government, ch. V, §40-43 and §46-50

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'

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

In Kant's teleology, the human being can be regarded as the "ultimate end" of nature, because human beings set themselves ends and use other beings as means; culture develops this capacity to pursue ends in general, but does not by itself make them morally good. Only the human being as subject of the moral law is a final end, dependent on no further end. Kant also condemns the wanton destruction of natural beauty, but as a violation of a duty to oneself: it weakens the disposition to love something independently of any use, a disposition that prepares the way for morality, and breaches no duty owed to nature itself.

Critique of the Power of Judgment, §83-84 · Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, §17 (AA VI, 443)

In the wake of Bacon and Descartes, 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: Rousseau 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

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

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

In "Nature", Mill rejects the idea that the natural order supplies a moral standard: useful action consists precisely in correcting its spontaneous course, and nature daily commits what we would punish in human beings. Yet he does not make productive transformation an end without limits: cultivating every piece of land capable of growing food, ploughing up every flowery waste or natural pasture, and exterminating non-domesticated birds and quadrupeds as rivals for food would sacrifice the beauty and solitude that human flourishing needs. His defence of the "stationary state" thus combines the improvement of nature with the preservation of wild places, without positing moral equality among all forms of life.

Three Essays on Religion, "Nature" (posthumous, 1874) · Principles of Political Economy, IV, ch. 6, §2

Reading Genesis, Ellul refuses to find in it a mandate for exploitation: man is called to represent God within creation, and so to exercise his "dominion" as God exercises it, not for power but "as the representative of God's love". Adam does not subdue the animals, he names them. His sociology gives the other side: in seeking to master nature, man has shut himself into a technical milieu more constraining than the one he was fleeing, the technological system.

"Le rapport de l'homme à la création selon la Bible" (Man's relation to creation according to the Bible) · The Technological System (1977), part I

In Building Dwelling Thinking, mortals dwell by "saving" the earth, which Heidegger spells out: to leave it to its own being, to spare it, not to master it or subjugate it, which is only one step from boundless exploitation. The Letter on Humanism likewise takes from the human being the rank of lord of beings and assigns it a guardianship, that of being. This guardianship is not the moral responsibility of ecological management: it is a relation of letting-be set against technological challenging, which ecological readings of Heidegger have taken up under that name. It does not make the human one living being among others, since he maintains an abyss between human existence and the animal, "poor in world".

Building Dwelling Thinking (lecture 1951, publ. 1954) · Letter on Humanism (written 1946, publ. 1947) · The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (lectures 1929-1930), §42-63

"Presumption is our natural and original malady." In the "Apology", Montaigne attacks the pride that leads human beings to claim a superior rank and arbitrarily assign capacities to other animals: his comparisons with animals challenge the supposed proofs of human exceptionalism rather than offering an account of animal life. In "Of Cruelty", he acknowledges obligations towards other creatures, while distinguishing the justice owed to human beings from the benevolence and kindness owed to animals, and describes a relationship of mutual obligation between them and us. This decentring brings him close to "a member among others", without establishing the moral equality of all living things.

Essays, II, 12 ("Apology for Raymond Sebond") · Essays, II, 11 ("Of Cruelty")

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

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

Simondon wrote no ethics of nature; his position follows from his ontology. Nothing in it exists as a finished individual set over against a world: every being individuates within a milieu with which it forms a system. The human is no exception, since its psychic and collective individuation extends vital individuation. Technics follows the same logic. The concrete technical object forms a coupling with its milieu, the associated milieu, at once technical and geographical: the Guimbal turbine is driven by the river water, which cools it at the same time. This systemic view does not abolish transformative action, since the human acts on the milieu it exploits and develops, but it makes it a minor share: Simondon denounces the master-and-slave schema applied to machines. Hence a split in which membership of a network dominates, with a share of stewardship and a minor share of mastery. Membership renders the human's insertion into a web of interdependencies, not a doctrine of the intrinsic value of living beings, which he does not develop. The share of stewardship renders the singular role the human keeps, that of organizer and interpreter of technical ensembles, who must understand and regulate their relations: a responsibility of understanding more than an ethics of preservation. The position is a reconstruction: it draws from an ontology of individuation a place for the human that Simondon does not formulate in moral terms.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), introduction and part I (the associated milieu, the Guimbal turbine) · Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (thesis 1958, publ. 2005), introduction

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