“Natural science, which associates knowledge with power, is indifferent to the distinction between man and nature. The expansion of mastery over nature is therefore always at the same time an expansion of our ability to be masters over human beings. But the process of this expansion remains itself ‘natural’ in the raw sense. And a history of man that is understood as nothing more than a history of the mastery of nature, is itself nothing more than natural history. But this means that it has no place for the distinction between what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘unnatural.’ From this perspective, even man’s total destruction of the biosphere on this planet could be understood as a change occurring in the course of natural history. From the same perspective, a garbage dump is no more unnatural than a mountain stream. The drive that dissolves and transforms the pre-given structures of nature, and thus reduces nature to its molecular elemental structures, is just as natural as the thing that it destroys. There is no transcendence of nature in this drive. Total technologization, carried to its end, is at the very same time total naturalization.
“A transcendence of nature occurs only when nature is recalled as it is in truth. The basic meaning of the word ‘culture’ is ‘cultivation,’ the care for precisely that nature from which culture frees itself. For thousands of years, culture meant a symbiotic relationship between man and nature, in which nature appeared at the same time as enemy, as giver, and as object of man’s cultivating mastery, ‘because a nature that one can rein in and tame so that it becomes something more friendly is the most beautiful thing there is on the earth.’ In modernity, what has replaced this symbiosis is the relationship of a progressive mastery that we would have to call despotic, because it progressively erodes the individual reality of what it masters. If Socrates could still say that the shepherd’s art is defined by the well-being of the sheep, and not from the perspective of the butcher, even though the sheep are ultimately handed over to the latter, this can no longer be said of modern raisers of livestock and breeders.
“The process of the naturalistic mastery of nature has in any event arrived at a point at which it has turned against man himself. Only now are we coming to realize that nature’s resources are finite with respect to what constitutes the living conditions of the human race. The survival of the race thus depends on bringing the expansion of technology and industry, as well as the population explosion produced by modern medicine, to an end for the sake of a new, longer-term state of equilibrium, a new symbiosis, which is no longer stabilized by human impotence, but by the conscious recollection of the natural foundations of human existence. The naturalistic expansion of the mastery of nature, far from lessening man’s mastery over man, instead increases both the need and the means for this mastery. It increases the need for an ever more comprehensive manipulation of human beings in order to make them useful cogs in its own nature-mastering machine. The ‘liberation’ from all historical modes of life serves this instrumentalization. Conversely, the increasing capacity to master nature in turn increases mastery over human beings, a mastery that is not based on freedom as is the relationship between command and obedience, but that, as ‘manipulation,’ objectifies man as nature instead. One attempts to justify such manipulation by pointing out that, to the extent that man is able to be manipulated, he is in fact a natural being, and thus is not free; and that what we are doing in this case is nothing more than putting rationally guided processes of socialization in the place of those provided by raw nature. But freedom is not a ‘core’ that remains left over after everything having to do with nature has been subjugated. The fundamental act of freedom is that of refraining from dominating what we are able to dominate, the act of ‘letting be.’ Only by reciprocally acknowledging the other and letting the other be free does the natural being transcend nature.”
— from “Nature,” an essay written in 1973, included in Robert Spaemann, A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person (Oxford University Press, 2015)
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