Philosophical Tropes

At various points when Hans Jonas spoke of power over nature I find myself wondering what he could have meant.

The orbiting astronaut or cosmonaut demonstrates no such power: if any critical equipment failure occurs, we are most often powerless to intervene.  They orbit in constant exposure to micro-meterorite strikes. Journalists report their high-velocity free-fall in the earth's gravitational well as "gravity-free" or "floating free of earth's gravity" in a foolish declaration of a falsehood as a triumph.

The fallout of the Soviet reactors should remind us how powerless we were to protect the Laplanders and their lichen-eating reindeer.

The most important features of the earth are the magnetic field shielding us from the solar wind and the molten inner core generating that field about the rotating planet.  We demonstrate no power over solar activity.  The magnetic field will reverse as it has reversed through the life of the planet.

What we are often powerless to do, is to undo the damage that we do.  Whether in the result of draining the bogs of Europe or in the deforestation in the Levant, we do not seem to demonstrate so much power as our aptitude for triggering unintended consequences.

The hyperbole about our power over nature may have the unintended consequence of undermining efforts to explain such undesirable effects as climate change, species extinction and ocean pollution.

When a fool such a Palin rejects the reality of climate change on the basis that man does not control nature, we should all see some problem in this rhetoric.


If we succeed in recreating a wooly mammoth, you can be sure that we will be powerless to restore the elephant herds of Africa or the prairie grasslands.

Perhaps what is meant by "nature" is what suggests this trope of "man's power over nature".
Our inability to predict such a wide range of serious unintended consequences should sober us: the power was supposed to begin in prediction.

Consider Hans Jonas on the fundamental consideration that man is an organism.  Some will contest that this is an optional "theoretical" standpoint. It is a fact.  Jonas on  the subject of death might have done better to consider the generations in populations.

What power over nature is being demonstrated by the gorilla with the "walking stick" or other innovations? [see: PLOS on gorilla use of tools.]

Man is no longer the "tool-using" organism.  When we finally reassess the "laboratory" handling of "Nim Chimsky" we will eventually concede that we are not so exclusively the language-using organism.

The UN report on the devastation of coral reefs since 1970 is not a testament to our power over nature.

Hans Jonas on death might have benefited from consideration of petroleum: millenia of dead plant matter entrusted to the shale in the earth's crust now gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.  Surely the reliance on petroleum is a metaphor worth perserving: refined as paraffin it brought odourless smoke to the candles and lamps of those who could afford it - while poisoning them silently with its fumes (as had the creosote of fires through the millenia.) The poor burned smelly fish oil or worse.