Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Stewardship
Axis: Humanity's place in nature — What place should human beings hold in nature: master, guardian, or simply one member among others?
Humanity'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.
Philosophers 3
Ellulexplicit
Reading Genesis, 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 .
"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
Jonasexplicit
explicitly raises the question that ancient ethics could not raise: has the biosphere, now vulnerable to our action, been entrusted to our keeping? His answer makes the human being the guardian, not the owner, of nature: the power that threatens it is the only one that can preserve it. This guardianship does not make the human one living being among others, since it is the only being capable of responsibility and the first imperative remains that there be a humanity. The stewardship pole is, to a large extent, his very position.
The Imperative of Responsibility, ch. I
Show inferred positions (1)
Heideggerinferable
In , mortals dwell by "saving" the earth, which 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 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 , 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
- 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 - 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