2023-09-15 14:24:05
The emergence of the Galilean approach in the 17th century allowed us to consider ourselves, with Descartes helping, as beings ofantinature. Not in the sense that we would be opposed to nature, where we would be against nature, but where we participate in a different essence: we would be metaphysically others. Casually, this break constituted a discreet but decisive turning point, which guided the rest of the story. The world has become dissociated: on the one hand, nature, the decor of our existence, full of available resources, and which can be understood only from the physico-mathematical angle; on the other, man, returned to himself, to the solitude of his reason and his affects.
However, we ended up understanding that this separation is not as clear as we had imagined. On the one hand, nature reacts to our actions on it, and reveals itself to be porous, not infinite, fragile: climate, reduction in living spaces, collapse of biodiversity, pollution of soil, water and air , deforestation, all the indicators are alarming and all the projections worrying. On the other hand, we are now aware that we are nibbling more and more eagerly on the earthly fruit that bears us, and we hardly know how to stop this bad tendency. So, we sense that this very future that we are anticipating implicitly through our actions could turn out to be radically different, and deep down, we fear it.
Some people blame science for this situation, pretending to confuse it with what it makes possible: in short, the spirit of science should be liquidated for the sole reason of a bad use of the world. But is it by renouncing scientific advances that we will repair the damage done? Is it with Aristotle’s physics that we will stabilize the climate? With the biology of Pliny the Elder, will we preserve biodiversity?
Rather than abandoning the idea of rationality, it is undoubtedly better to overhaul it so that it can no longer serve as an alibi for all kinds of domination. But how to do it ?
With Giuseppe Longo , mathematician and epistemologist, author of Prometheus’ Nightmare, sciences and their limits (PUF, 2023).
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