The mastery of nature

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

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

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

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

Jonas starts from an observation: human action has changed its nature. Its effects are cumulative, irreversible, planetary, and modern technology has become an endless enterprise that pushes the Baconian ideal of mastery to the point where it threatens. He rejects its neutrality without preaching any return to the past. His answer is methodological: a heuristics of fear, in which the evil we can imagine teaches us about the good to preserve, and a decision rule that gives the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss whenever the very existence of humanity is at stake. A clearly critical value, short of the extreme of refusal.

The Imperative of Responsibility, preface, ch. I-II · The Imperative of Responsibility, ch. V (the Baconian ideal)

Jonas 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