Nature, Technology, and the Emergence of Cybernetic Humanity - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 49

worn-out epistemology blind to the reality and power of productive
praxis—can yield nature in a form adequate to humanity's essence.
It is only when nature finally appears as nothing but the result of
human labor, and so as a reflection and affirmation of humanity's species-
essence, that it can serve as “the visible, irrefutable proof of [man's] birth
through himself, of the process of his creation .” 23 Here, then, appears a
nature transformed into the historical product of human handiwork,
now merely the result of human productive forces and dependent from
this point forward on the degree of development of these forces. With
capitalism, Marx approvingly writes, “nature becomes for the first time
simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be
recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of
its independent laws appears only as a stratagem to subdue it to human
requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the means of
production.” 24 But capitalism, because of its internal contradictions, is
incapable, according to Marx, of effecting the total humanization of
nature. His argument for a scientific socialism rests precisely on its capac-
ity to conclude what capitalism started but could not finish. Putting aside
the etiology of Communism's abject failure in the twentieth century, we
still must conclude that Marx, no less than Adam Smith, carried forward
the inner meaning of modernity as the technoscientific mission to bring
nature to her “true anthropological form,” and thus into harmony with
humanity's species-essence. But beyond this utopian desire, Marx oddly
seems never to have reflected much on the further consequences of the
humanization of natural processes already well underway, assuming, as
does capitalism, its naturalness and desirability. For a more radical
probing of modern anthropocentrism, we must turn to Heidegger and
his difficult ontologizing of technology and the world it has created.
Heidegger and the Being of Technology
Like Marx, Heidegger rejected philosophical idealism and the Western
metaphysical bias toward theory, and located our fundamental engage-
ment with the world in technological praxis. In Being and Time , he
embarked—evidently with Marx in mind—on a new interpretation of
humanity's productive relationship with beings. 25 There, he argues that
our ability to make and utilize tools is grounded in a pretheoretical,