The domination of nature

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.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism 3

Novum Organum, I, §3 and §129

Knowledge is worth not for contemplation but for its fruits: to know causes is to be able to produce effects, and the measure of a truth is the work it makes possible. Bacon judges this by the mechanical arts, which have grown without cease while the philosophy of the schools stood still: printing, gunpowder, and the compass have changed the world more than all the systems. Technology is thus no suspect by-product of knowledge but its legitimate end and the lever of human progress, against the resignation that holds the present condition to be beyond improvement.

Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.Novum Organum, I, §3

Novum Organum, I, §3, §81 and §129

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".

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.Letter on Humanism (1946)

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

Heidegger starts from the current definition, technology as a means in the service of human ends, and calls it "correct" but not "true": it misses the essence, which rules out instrumentalism from the start. Modern technology is a mode of revealing that no longer lets things come forth, as craftsmanly poiesis did, but "challenges" them (herausfordern): the Rhine is ordered to deliver its energy to the power plant, the forest its cellulose, everything becomes standing-reserve (Bestand), a stock always on call. The human being is itself requisitioned by this challenging and threatened with understanding itself only in terms of availability. The gathering of all these ways of ordering, enframing (Gestell), is the supreme danger, for it risks closing off every other relation to being. Heidegger nonetheless refuses to curse the apparatus: he quotes Hölderlin (where danger is, grows the saving power also) and recommends, in the 1955 speech collected in Discourse on Thinking, a "yes and no" to technical objects: his critique targets the essence, not the instruments.

The Question Concerning Technology (lecture 1953, publ. 1954) · Discourse on Thinking ("Memorial Address", 1955, publ. 1959)

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.

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.Discourse on Method, VI

Discourse on Method, VI

For Descartes, the new science has a practical end: to yield techniques, mechanical arts, and a medicine that would prolong life and relieve the human condition. This optimism in the transformative power of applied knowledge anticipates techno-optimism, though it never forms an explicit thesis about technology as such.

Discourse on Method, VI