Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Mastery
Axis: Humanity's place in nature — What place should human beings hold in nature: master, guardian, or simply one member among others?
Through knowledge and technology, human beings are called to make themselves as , to relieve their condition and improve life. Nature is a resource to be understood and transformed in the service of humanity.
Movements 3
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
Show inferred positions (1)
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'
Philosophers 9
Lockeexplicit
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
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
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
Marxexplicit
For Marx, labour transforms nature while developing human capacities: nature is man's "inorganic body", and this activity remains a material exchange on which he depends. Collective mastery of that exchange confers no absolute right of ownership over the earth, however: even a whole society is only its usufructuary, and must hand it down improved to the generations that follow. His critique of capitalist agriculture thus shows that productive development turns destructive when it exhausts worker and soil alike.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, first manuscript, "Estranged Labour" · Capital, I, "Machinery and Modern Industry", §10 · Capital, III, ch. 46
Show inferred positions (4)
Hegelinferable
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")
Kantinferable
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)
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
Millinferable
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
- 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 - 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 - 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