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193 I Philosophical thinking has been in large part anthropocentric, in a peculiar way: it has regarded man as the center of creation on the basis of his intellect and, more specifically, of rational thought. In this way, philosophy has been the foundation for the intellectual culture and the particular technological culture known as rationalistic; it is given a practical application in science, and it presumes and encourages a unique and dominant position for man vis-à-vis all other living and material beings and natural phenomena. It is the same rationalism that investigates the essence of truth, that investigates the nature and essence of matter in the same way on the basis of consistent questions, and that proceeds to explain the relationships between objects in mathematical terms, and this same rationalism ends up giving all this a practical application through engineering and exploiting nature in a scientific and methodical fashion. Despite the positivism of science and its indifference to metaphysical problems, it is natural that this science, being the outcome of an idealistic philosophy in which matter was not given its proper place, should inspire a subconscious inclination toward human dominance in the material world. Although this “dominion” is not wrong as a tendency, it nevertheless gives rise to the dangers that we see today when it is insatiable and uncontrolled—when it lacks any ethical restraint. In spite of its rationalistic and spiritualizing basis, classical Greek philosophy managed to achieve a balanced relationship between spirit and matter and inspire admiration and wonder for creation. There was indeed an absolute priority of value given to spirit as compared with matter, chiefly in the Nature and Creation: A Comment on the Environmental Problem from a Philosophical and Theological Standpoint Nikos Nissiotis 194 N I KO S N I S S I OT I S works of Plato, yet this did not lead people to devalue material creation utterly or suck it dry—as has happened with the idealism of modern times, which has maintained extreme and one-sided interpretations of Plato. Furthermore , Aristotelian philosophy, by presupposing Platonism and avoiding the extremes of an idealistic interpretation of it, provided an extraordinary balance for philosophy throughout the ages. Matter is not something that simply exists but it is what exists as matter, that is, the possibility of existence from essence to form via movement, which is the essence of existent things. There is a correspondence, a coherence, and a sufficient intimate and indissoluble relationship naturally provided between spirit-intellect on the one hand and material reality and material objects on the other, a relationship on which all sciences have to be predicated. Medieval and modern Western European philosophy was grounded on these classical presuppositions, yet because of the interposition of a false, spiritualistic Christian worldview, it veered off into a purely anthropocentric rationalistic monism; spirit was given absolute priority over matter, and in consequence nature was regarded as material to be exploited, serving only to further material and technological progress. The being, the essence of things was fragmented; it was looked at in the context not of the relationship between being and things but only of the ability of the human spirit to observe things as material and inanimate, to classify them into series and evaluate them on the basis of their properties in order to produce a work of benefit to technological progress. So instead of the relationship between spirit and matter, what inevitably crept in was engineering and, at the end of our era, the supermachine of electrical engineering—the machine of reflex “thoughts,” which is a technical substitute for both spirit and matter, combining the two, participating in both, and fashioning a new relationship between them. Thus anthropocentrism and spiritualizing philosophy led to the domination of the machine in the service of man’s absolute dominance in nature. When this philosophical aberration began (for example, with Descartes’ methodological doubt of all things, on the grounds that they were presented to the reason tainted by the “evil spirit,” a taint that only the human intellect escapes because it discovers that it is unable to doubt only the Absolute, meaning the God of idealism ), no one perhaps imagined that it would result in a rupture of the proper relationship between spirit and matter, humans and nature, and even the creation of the deus ex machina outside that relationship, a powerless god indifferent to the magnitude of the respect that man should have for material...

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