Member among others

"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