10, 2 (2025)

Technology and Nature

Is there such a thing as nature today, when there is no dimension untouched by human artifice, neither on the ‘outside’, in the surrounding space, nor on the ‘inside’ of man himself? When mankind has long since been ‘able to govern its own evolution’ when even once-remote and intangible planets do not escape human handiwork, becoming subject to colonisation and exploitation as resources on a par with the last elements of matter? With the launching of Sputnik–– hailed with “relief” as “the first step towards the liberation of mankind from the earthly prison,” as we read in Vita Activa (a liberation also for Levinas and Blanchot)––the transformation of the world into an image is no longer just a philosophical interpretation but a real fact, as evidenced by the “Earthrise” photograph before the eye of the whole of humanity, including that of Heidegger, who looked at it with dread, as he declared in an interview with “Der Spiegel.” This epochal event – one of the very rare instances in which this expression is truly fitting – represents a definitive farewell to nature: “On 4 October 1957 (...) Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time, the natural world was completely enclosed in an artificial container. When the Earth entered this new artefact, nature ended, and ecology was born. Ecological consciousness became inevitable as soon as the planet acquired the status of a work of art” (Marshall McLuhan).

But what about before this moment? Has there ever existed ‘for us’ a nature that precedes human intervention and is constantly lost, an object of nostalgia and myth, a nature beyond the human will to return to it as to a state of immediacy and innocence? Has not nature, seen from the standpoint of civilized humans, always been only the background from which detachment is needed or the place to which return is intensely desired, at least since humans tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil?

For Western-Christian thought, nature as irredeemable creation represents an obstacle to closeness with God: philia tou kosmou is echthra tou theou; and the overcoming of the world, whether as an active negation of nature in asceticism or as an eschatological orientation beyond the world, is the hallmark of Christian anthropotheology. According to Karl Löwith’s well-known thesis, this is the prerequisite for the future technical dominion over the Earth. Except for Spinoza––the “erratic boulder of the metaphysical tradition”–modern metaphysics is, in effect and broadly speaking, Christian dualistic anthropology: the submission of nature to the intelligence that thinks and wills, to the spirit that knows neither kosmos nor physis, but only the abstract, mathematical-experimental concept of nature and order.

No longer visible with ‘the eyes of the body’ through natural vision, but only visible with the ‘eyes of the spirit’ that calculates and by means of technical instruments, even before Kant’s Copernican revolution, the astronomical revolution broke the ancient correspondence between the visible and the real, between eye and cosmos. Thus, for the Enlightenment, the cosmos is no longer what it appears to be self-evident, but the present infinite universe shaped through sophisticated calculating manoeuvres supported by technological devices. The Kantian revolution, the idea of a mathematically anticipated nature, persists, if not even strengthens, even when driven by the regulative idea of “end,”, as seen in the ambiguous expression ‘technique of nature’ in the First Introduction to the third critique: the idea of nature as if it were designed with a view to its knowability by Judgement (and precisely this idea of nature as organization and system would later be adopted and reinterpreted in cybernetics).

Within this framework, that is, within the framework of a philosophy dominated by transcendental subjectivity (from which not even the romantic philosophy of nature and even Schelling would escape), only Goethe, the great pagan on the one hand, and Nietzsche, the great atheist on the other--not without an explicit debt of the latter to the former–would align with Spinoza’s understanding of nature: a Dionysian understanding for Nietzsche, who does not hesitate to recognise that he believed in the same God as Goethe (Twilight of the Idols). It is a ‘retraction of man into nature’ that is anything but peaceful, an explosive return to the ‘innocence of becoming’ which is the opposite of the Rousseauian case: the invocation of the ‘Newton of the moral world’ who ‘wanted a return to nature,’ but in a completely different direction.

The Rousseauian idea of a “normative nature” refers to the very wide range of reflections concerning the relationship between physis and nomos in modern techno-industrial civilisation, between the defence of universal human rights––anchored in the recognition of a natural right continually recalled, renewed and expanded (until Stiegler’s liminal “digital natural right”)––, the materialist critique of political economy in all its senses, starting from Marx but beyond Marx, and again genealogical critique and biopolitical consideration of nature as ‘normalised life’ and ‘governable animality’ through old and new technologies.

With the ‘recent invention’ of the concept ‘life,’ which is removed from all immediate visibility, we are in the midst of the modern consideration of nature, unthinkable before scientific abstraction, and yet also in the direction of the fulfilment of a natural and/or naturalistic concept of nature. The integral dissolution of the phenomenon ‘nature’ in its instrumental detection and experimental measurement, its translation into ‘verbal painting’ or ‘information’, in fact unfolds, once the very idea of subject and subjectivity has disappeared, the space for non-anthropocentric––or in most cases presumably non-anthropocentric––considerations of nature. Undoubtedly, as McLuhan pointed out, nature, dead in itself, lives or rather survives as an environment. It is indifferently a resource to be protected or exploited, or even both, as is clearly visible in all current legislation aimed at preserving its ‘value’ (aesthetic, economic, ethical, and even political).

Other attempts in the direction of a non-anthropocentric idea of nature, as well as far from a naturalistic idea of nature, are those proposed by authors such as Descola, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Viveiros de Castro, etc.

Faced with a philosophical question as wide-ranging and profound as the one central to this issue of Mechane, the outlined framework can only be an indicative trajectory. It naturally omits various approaches. Therefore, this issue welcomes contributions that align with and operate within these coordinates, but also those that explore other perspectives, critically addressing the concept of nature and engaging with some of the following lines of reflection:

1. Genealogies and crisis of the concept of nature: from the classical and modern philosophical tradition to the transformations of the contemporary scientific and technical paradigm.
2. The technical character of human nature: the process of technical construction of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ environment of human beings from the earliest stages of hominisation to the present day.
3. Techniques of control of nature: investigations into historical and contemporary forms of governing biological and political life, in which operational practices and definitions of “nature” are configured as instruments of power, programming and regulation.

Contributions are welcome in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish. Interested authors are invited to send a short abstract (max 500 words) to mechane.journal@gmail.com by 15 September 2025. Authors of accepted proposals should send the full text (max 40000 characters) by 15 December 2025. Submissions will be subject to a peer review process.