Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Humans in Nature: Toward a Physiocentric Philosophy
Humans in Nature: Toward a Physiocentric Philosophy
Pages 168-184
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From page 168... ...
Humans in Nature: Toward a Physiocentric Philosophy KLAUS MICHAEL MEYER-ABICH What is the question to which humans are the answer? Narrowly speaking, this was the riddle the Sphinx posed to Oedipus: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?
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From page 169... ...
. "The natural history of mind" sounds strange to the modern philosophical ear, but is not the perception of nature itself a natural process, so that human awareness and that of other beings of the conatural world and of the whole itself must be considered within the description of nature?
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From page 170... ...
In fact, after billions of years in natural history, one of the many beings that had emerged from evolution raised its head and, in Greek antiquity, called the whole what it is: cosmos and physis. Humboldt's approach to science bears a chance to avoid the basic inconsistency of modern science as otherwise developed, that is, to comprehend the world except for a blind spot with respect to the most basic fact of that comprehension namely, that the world includes scientists who strive to comprehend it.
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From page 171... ...
A little earlier Raphael had already omitted the screen in his Alba Madonna, showing Mary as a young woman in the country. A little later than van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden (1400-1464)
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From page 172... ...
In the background a city fits into the landscape. A similar Giorgione work, The Tempest, is frequently considered the beginning of modern secular Western paint ~ng.
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From page 173... ...
In the environmental crisis, other ideas that meet the Copernican challenge could also get their chances. For instance, a truly Copernican answer to the Copernican challenge was developed by Giordano Bruno, who was burnt in 1600 for insisting on God's infinity as a property of the world.
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From page 174... ...
. Industrial society's blackout of its own belonging to nature, and its exploitation of nature as that which we are not, are essentially Baconian.
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From page 175... ...
Bacon's idea which he conceived when he turned to science after losing office was to extend power to a third level on top of the two political levels of human domination within humanity, namely, the domination of humanity over nature (Bacon, 1858, section 1291. If we take this to mean human domination in nature, considering our own participation in nature, and if we interpret domination more broadly as political order, Bacon's idea means that the social order of life is to be embedded in a more comprehensive order of nature in which humanity relates itself to the co-natural world.
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From page 176... ...
For instance, no modern foreign minister has influenced international relations to the extent that Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Meitner did with their discovery of nuclear fission, and no minister of economics or labor has ever been as effective in these fields as the applied physicists of Silicon Valley. This would not have surprised Bacon, and he can remind us that the two orders are interlinked.
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From page 177... ...
, by man stepping into God's shoes. Technological man became deified in humanity (hominem homini Deum esse)
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From page 178... ...
271~. These views sound familiar, naive, and superstitious in light of the failures of twentieth-century development policies intended to let developing countries "catch up" with the industrialized ones (see Grubler, this volume)
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From page 179... ...
To consider nature like Bacon and unlike industrial society-as something to come was a common idea to the philosophers of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. "In the name of nature they requested beings and military commanders, officials and priests to respect human life" (Condorcet, 1976, p.
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From page 180... ...
The discovery of this formerly hidden order, however, convinced Kant that nature was not the obstinate subject it had been considered, and in his philosophy he ventured to explain how its order is constituted. Kant did not doubt that as humans are a part of nature, human history equally is.
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From page 181... ...
Kant's philosophy of history lacks totalitarian optimism as well as the presumptuousness of the philosophers of perfection by progress, and at the same time is truly Copernican. The question is how we locate ourselves in nature, or what is our ecological niche, and not what the rest of the world has to offer to please us.
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From page 182... ...
Finally, the environmental crisis reminds us that peace is not a matter of humanity being a closed society, but rather ought to be found in siting ourselves in the whole of nature. We might succeed in so doing within the next five hundred years.
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From page 183... ...
. Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de ['esprit humain Entwurf einer historischen Darstellung der Fortschritte des menschlichen Geistes, W
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From page 184... ...
1992. De ipsa nature sive de vi insita actionibusque creaturarum Uber die Natur an sich oder uber die den erschaffenen Dingen innewohnende Kraft und Tatigkeit.
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