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

Observer · Agency Whether observation shapes reality or merely registers it Matter · Ontological Status Whether matter is fundamental, relational, or emergent Observer · Number Whether selves are genuinely distinct, or aspects of one

The stances

Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world.

30 schools

On these views, humans were never outside nature, and the question of our 'place in' it is the question of how to live within the relations that already constitute us. Plants, animals, rivers, ancestors, descendants are not resources or stage scenery; they are kin and co-citizens in a community of being. To act well is to weave well; to act badly is to tear the web one is also part of.

Why these schools land hereThese schools share matter=Relational with obs_number=Plural and information that is conserved (not destroyed in the ordinary working of things). Matter is not a substance separable from its relations; it is constituted by them. Persons are real and distinct, but they are nodes in a web rather than atoms in a void. Animism, African Traditional Religion, Ubuntu ("I am because we are"), Afrofuturism / Black Quantum Futurism, Shintoism, and Deep Ecology share this structural commitment and arrive — across very different cultural contexts — at a remarkably consistent ethic of seven-generation thinking, ancestral and descendant obligation, and partnership with non-human beings.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

Subject to a real natural order we did not make.

25 schools

On 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.

Why these schools land hereThese schools share obs_agency=Passive — observers who register rather than originate — combined with a given world the observer does not constitute. For schools with matter=Substantival, that world is materially real and mind-independent: Realism, Determinism, Eternalism, Naturalism, Multiverse Theory, and the Reformed theological tradition (which treats creation as a real ordered cosmos given by God). For schools with matter=Emergent, the given is constituted by patterns or processes the observer aligns with rather than makes: Taoism (the Tao to be followed), Structuralism (the structures we inherit), Occasionalism (the divine causation behind every event), Empiricism (the world of sense given to us). The cluster is philosophically heterogeneous about what does the giving, but agrees that the human posture toward nature is one of receiving and fitting in rather than originating.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform.

103 schools

On 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.

Why these schools land hereThese schools share obs_agency=Active or Both with matter=Substantival — a real natural order, but observers who genuinely shape what happens within it. The cluster includes Catholic / Thomistic theology (with its tradition of natural-law stewardship), Confucianism (cultivation of moral order in a real social-cosmic world), Jainism, Dialectical Materialism (humans as active transformers of material conditions), Critical Realism, Stoicism, Lutheranism, and others. The signature unites religious stewardship traditions with secular activist traditions; they share the commitment that nature is real and that human action is one of its real causes.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world.

31 schools

On 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.

Why these schools land hereThese schools share obs_agency=Active or Both with matter=Emergent — an observer who actively shapes what is, and a material reality that is constituted from arrangement rather than given as bedrock. The cluster brings together Existentialism, Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Process Philosophy, Constructivism, Postmodernism, Relationalism, Simulation Theory, Quantum Realism, and many others. They disagree on what does the constituting (mind, language, practice, becoming, computation) but agree that the world-we-inhabit is partly downstream of how we engage it.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

Humans and nature share an underlying unity — the separation was the mistake.

17 schools

On 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.

Why these schools land hereThese schools share obs_number=Singular — what appear as distinct selves, including the distinction between human and non-human, are aspects of a deeper unity. Advaita Vedānta, Sufi waḥdat al-wujūd, Idealism, Solipsism, Neo-Platonism, Rationalism (Spinoza-style), and Transcendentalism each express this conclusion in their own vocabulary. The ethical implication is direct: harm to the more-than-human world is harm to oneself, because the boundary was always conventional.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

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.

Madhyamaka Post-Structuralism

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What is our place in nature?

Context

Why it matters

The coordinates that split the schools

The stances

Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world.

Subject to a real natural order we did not make.

Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform.

Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world.

Humans and nature share an underlying unity — the separation was the mistake.

Schools the coordinates don't place

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