Dilemma
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Context
The Anthropocene — the proposed geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet — names a question philosophy spent millennia treating in the abstract: what is the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world? Climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, and the rise of artificial intelligence have made that abstract question concrete. So has the renewed Western attention to indigenous philosophy, which never treated humans as standing apart from the rest of nature in the first place. The disagreement among schools here doesn't run along the religious / secular axis; it runs along the question of whether nature is something we are inside of, something we depend on but observe from outside, something we work on, something we constitute through our concepts and practices, or something that is, in the end, identical with us.
Why it matters
The question determines what counts as a good response to the climate crisis (restoration to a given order? acceleration into transcendence? reweaving of a torn web?), what counts as flourishing for non-human beings, what kinds of technology are appropriate, and whether the framing of 'humans versus nature' was ever the right framing in the first place. The partition this dilemma produces is different from the ones above: indigenous and relational worldviews come to the foreground as a primary stance rather than a peripheral cluster.
The coordinates that split the schools
The stances
Subject to a real natural order we did not make.
18 schoolsOn these views, nature is a real, ordered, mind-independent reality that we are inside of but did not construct. Our fundamental posture toward it is one of observation, discovery, and humility before laws that are not ours to make. Stewardship and conservation are real obligations, but the order itself is given — it isn't ours to redesign, and the work is to live well within it.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Nature includes its limits; colonisation is bounded by what the cosmos allows. on Should we colonize space?
- 1% Biology is what it is; we modify it within real biological constraints. on Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
- 1% Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all. on Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
- 1% Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation. on Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
- 1% Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial. on Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform.
68 schoolsOn these views, nature is real and given, but our relation to it is active: we cultivate the earth, steward what we are given, name and order what we find. The work of being human includes the work of shaping the world we are part of. To do this well is to be a co-worker in nature; to do it badly is to break what we depended on.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. on Should we colonize space?
- 1% Genetic modification is cultivation by other means. on Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
- 1% Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. on Is the world created from nothing?
- 1% Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting. on Is the physical world fully real?
- 1% Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good. on Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world.
27 schoolsOn these views, the 'nature' we live in is not a stand-alone given but something co-constituted by the categories, concepts, technologies, and practices through which we encounter it. There is a world prior to our practices, but what shows up in it as significant, real, salient — wilderness, resource, ecosystem, climate — is shaped by us. The Anthropocene name is, on this view, exactly right: we have made the world we are now responsible for.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it. on Should we colonize space?
- 1% What counts as a 'natural' genome is itself a construction. on Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
- 1% The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. on Do you really choose?
- 1% The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. on Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
- 1% An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
Humans and nature share an underlying unity — the separation was the mistake.
13 schoolsOn non-dual views, the apparent distinction between human and non-human is itself a perspectival distinction within a single underlying reality. The work isn't to find our right relationship to a separate nature; it is to recognize that we were never separate. Climate harm, on this reading, is self-harm — not metaphorically but ontologically.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Individuality dissolves into the One. on What happens to "you" when you die?
- 1% From the standpoint of the One, the question doesn’t apply in the form it is asked. on When does a person begin?
- 1% All union is participation in the One — particular forms are conventional. on What is marriage?
- 1% Money's apparent diversity is convention over a single underlying value. on What is money?
- 1% Nations are conventional partitions of a single humanity. on What is a nation?
Schools the coordinates don't place
These schools don't satisfy any stance's coordinate pattern strongly enough to be assigned — either because they decline to commit on the question (Confucianism is famously silent on what comes after; Pyrrhonian and pragmatist traditions suspend judgment), or because their attribute signature crosses categories in a way the five buckets don't capture.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma — they\'re where the same questions get stress-tested in cleaner cases.
Related Films
Films engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma.
Related Historical Debates
Historical confrontations where parties argued out questions on these dimensions.