Homo industrialis, or the fatal cult of the artificial (by Mathias Lefèvre and Jacques Luzi)

We have reproduced an enlightening analysis of industrial society and the strange species that gave birth to it, Homo Industrialis. This text was originally published in the journal Ecology & Politics in 2017 by Mathias Lefèvre and Jacques Luzi. The second is a lecturer in economics and the presenter of the journal.

We understand why artificialism has now become the official ideology of domination, which denies the necessity of nature and even its existence; it wants to become finally and absolutely what it has always wanted to be: a totality from which men can no longer even dream of leaving, a world without outside.

— Encyclopedia of Nuisances^[1]

Our distance from nature will only end when we do it again.

— F. M. Esfandiary^[2]

We think the future will be very bright.

— J. Craig Venter^[3]

According to the best supported theory to date, the human species appeared on Earth as life evolved. It spread little by little, until it left its mark everywhere. Today, there are few so-called “natural” environments that are not more or less anthropized. The human species, however, is divided into groups, communities, communities, societies. Each society is characterized by a particular language, norms, values, values, purposes, conventions, beliefs, institutions. Through these, each maintains a particular relationship with the terrestrial base and the living world, with other animals and the elements: earth, water, air, wood, fire. While every human leaves traces of his passage through his actions, by his way of life, those of some humans are more profound and tenacious than others. This is especially the case of Homo industrialis, today present in multiple places around the world and seeking, wherever they are, to master everything related to nature. What they do together — their productions, their arrangements, their uses, their consumption — results in the increasing artificialization of the Earth.

Forests razed to make way for monocultures, livestock and concrete. Mines and wells dug deep into the ground to extract ore and fuel. Gases released en masse into the atmosphere. Plastic materials and chemical fluids closely mixed with water and air and then with living organisms. Thus, among other processes, artificialization progresses, through alteration, contamination and impoverishment. This is both an intended and unintended effect of the industrial lifestyle. Where this way of life has established itself and wherever it can be traced, everything that does not already bear the seal ofHomo industrialis is on reprieve. Faced with a “natural” thing (which he did not manufacture), the latter affirms: “You could no longer be as you are, if it were useful to me.” That is to say, depending on your malleability, I can reshape you, manipulate you, recut you, recut you, train you, defile you, destroy you. I can do that with more power than anyone. And I can even do it without wanting to and without being aware of it, because my action has undesirable effects that I am not able to anticipate or conceive of.

This humanity, which represents the world as an object of control, refuses any obstacle to its will. Nothing to which this will can be applied, or even nothing of what is alive today, is therefore safe from a possibly fatal alteration.

***

Each human society has its own way of imagining and living in the world, but the conditions of existence of each human being are unchangeable: to live on Earth and to be subservient to this planet; to have been generated by the union of a man and a woman; to have a biological body, animated by a psyche and subject to illness, old age and death; to be born and to live among other humans already socialized, agents of humanization of the newborn; coexisting and interacting with other living beings, plants and animals.

The human being, bipedal without wings or fins, is basically terrestrial. He lives on Earth, from Earth. It mingles with him, through the food he ingests, the water he drinks, the air he breathes, and, in the end, decomposing body or ash and smoke, he returns and mingles. It cannot therefore be done without it, which is not reciprocal. Earth is its mother, its biotope, its horizon. A terrestrial fragment, humans need humus, but also other living beings in the world, with which they have coevolved over time and which populate their imagination (their dreams, their stories, their legends, their legends, their legends, their myths, their artistic works). Earth is not a pebble in a human's shoe, it is his home, corporally, so physically and spiritually.

A talking, thinking being, picturing to a degree that no other animal can reach. This is undoubtedly, in the imaginative and creative capacity, what makes humans what they are: everywhere the same, everywhere different. This world that he creates in himself, in his entrails, in his heart and in his head, is based on what is presented to him, to his senses. But it is also “altering”: it is from what he imagines that the human being affects what was there at the beginning and that he cannot, at least partially, not affect. He creates or tries to create from what is already there what he wants to see there. The result may be a hut or a skyscraper, a totem or a church, a canoe or a hydroelectric dam, a few cassava plants or acres of transgenic soybeans, an arrow or an intercontinental ballistic missile. It depends on all these inventions that hold the community together: language, norms, rules, rules, values, purposes, beliefs, myths, etc. Complex relationships, not simply functional and causal, between what is imagined and what is done, are specific to each individual, each society, each era, and it is difficult to elucidate them. Imagination can be said to be individual (from one individual to another, the representative flow is never the same and the imaginative capacity differs), social (what an individual imagines depends largely on what society has taught him) and historical (representations change over time). Theoretically, the imagination has no limits. The only limits that exist are those that nature imposes on the realization of what is imagined and those that are particular to each human (therefore to each society and to each era), the prohibitions that he imposes on himself, the feelings and representations that he suppresses or inhibits.

A human life is short, its end certain and inevitable. Surviving requires painstaking efforts, giving birth, being ill and aging are sources of discomfort and pain. When did humans first complain about the difficulties and suffering inherent in the human condition? The only certainty is that the project to remodel it in its entirety only emerged with the advent of industrial society. It is with the imagination of a new design, that of rationally mastering nature, and its increasingly methodical application, that theHomo industrialis has begun to seriously believe in the possibility of making the human condition an option, of substituting the natural necessity generated by chance with an artificial necessity generated by technoscience. Eliminate the disease. Slow down aging. Repel death. Get rid of toil. Artificially reproduce humans (and, more broadly, life). Transforming Earth. Leaving her.

***

A few centuries ago, in the west of the European continent, took shape, slowly, in deeply unequal Christian societies,Homo industrialis. What does he want? He wants to become “the master and owner of nature.” But still? He wants to conquer the world, by force, by cunning, by knowledge, by money, by fire. He wants to impose his institutions and meanings on other humans, whom he considers inferior. He wants to flood the world with his goods. He wants to make everything a commodity; or to make everything a resource, a raw material for the indefinite and ever more accelerated production of goods, in order to raise the heap of money that the sale of these generates and that the dominant ones seize. He wants to take possession of everything he can make into a raw material, by force, by ruse, by knowledge, by money, by fire. He wants to start all the fireworks. He wants to turn everything upside down, set everything on fire. He wants to embrace the burning of the world until the ashes are discovered, then, his mischief accomplished, escape into the vastness of space.

***

Driven by such ambition, it is obvious thatHomo industrialis leaves nothing or anyone unscathed. He takes everything in his path, including those who resist him. Until now, he has overcome or broken the obstacles in his path, he has fed on them, it has strengthened him.

Armed with his technoscience and his ever more powerful machines, driven by progressive faith, he transformed the relationship with time, space and work, with a view, in the long term, to abolish them. Wishful thinking, of course. However, today we are talking about factories without humans, where only robots “work”. It is not quite ready, machines still need human assistance, but that is what is coveted: to eliminate the hazard specific to the human person. After all, this would only be the logical continuation of a well-advanced reification, which began over a century ago with the rationalization of the work process (fragmentation, timekeeping, etc.). Moreover, all these motor vehicles, driving, floating, flying, all these communication tools, the telegraph, the telephone and then the Internet, which he invented and which he quickly used to raise the monetary pile, stem from the same wish: to contract space by increasing the speed of transport (people, goods, goods, goods, words, data, money) to “save time”, because “time is of money”, money is “the lifeblood”, and war, the invariant without which the industrial order could not last.

Armed with his technoscience and his ever more powerful machines, driven by progressive faith, he transformed the relationship with the earth, with the elements, with the living world. His adoration of the mechanical goes hand in hand with his hatred and his insensitivity to the living, in particular the non-domesticated, “wild” living, which is born and transformed independently of its will. Homo industrialis is a child of cities. Cities that, after more than one hundred and fifty years of industrialization, have become agglomerates of concrete and metal covering the formerly living ground. It is not massive everywhere, here and there plants pierce the surface, sheltering the life that the urban tolerates. Nevertheless, the automobile, this totem of the industrial world, remains queen there. Even though it dominates the public space of circulation, pollutes the air, breaks the silence, injures and kills in numbers, it seems immovable. As well as television, this other fetish, which was broadcast in parallel with the car and participates — just like the other objects equipped with screens that have been added to it — in the same distance from the surrounding world, in this placing above ground of the human being, in its denaturation and its dehumanization.

This is how the formation and evolution of industrial societies (capitalists, merchants, merchants, consumers, entertainment...) have been accompanied by an erosion of the living, outside and in the human. Clearly, the unlimited quest for power and money has a strong erosive power. Primeval forests have almost all disappeared, and with them most of the known and unknown beings who inhabited them. In many places, humus is just a memory, countless environments have been altered, many plant and animal species have died out. Artifacts that degrade extremely slowly or impossible (concrete, metal, plastic materials, plastic materials, radioactive atoms, industrial greenhouse gases, chemical substances, metallic trace elements, nanoparticles) cover the natural world or are closely intertwined with it. The whole Earth is concerned, from the abyss to the exosphere. No organism is spared. None are immune.

***

In 1929, in a small book entitled The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, John Desmond Bernal, a British physicist of Marxist persuasion, projected himself into a future where Homo industrialis, thanks to his technoscience, would have transformed his body and the Earth in order to emancipate himself from it^[4]. Today more than ever, Bernal's followers are multiplying, finding in the perspective of emancipation from the human condition, the insane meaning of the technoscientific means that they are constantly working to invent and perfect.

The roboticist Hans Moravec, of neoliberal persuasion, affirms that, in a world that is reduced to a “cyberspace” (the space interconnecting computers and brains), the human senses — and therefore the body — will become obsolete. In the same vein, among others, Marvin Minsky, an MIT scientist, and Ray Kurzweil, an engineer and professor at the same institution, hope for a near future where humans and their technologies will hybridize, the “spirit” gradually getting rid of the body, this simple meat bag, a simple meat bag source of all disturbance and confusion, to exist forever in this famous cyberspace, in which it will have been downloaded.” like any computer software. Before this final stage of disembodiment where “life” can be extended indefinitely — and therefore death, this “scandal”, indefinitely postponed —, the body, thanks to the nanorobots that will be introduced and the genetic manipulations to which it will be subjected, will be better resistant to diseases and aging, it will be more “efficient” and will then tend towards “perfection”, as it is identified with the machine: to the abstraction achieved.

Kurzweil, who also works for Google, founded a Singularity University in collaboration with this company and NASA. “Singularity” is the supposed advent, in the coming decades, of an artificial “superintelligence”, the fruit of human intelligence but surpassing it; then technical progress will no longer be the product of the human, which has become completely obsolete, but of this superintelligence, which will guide him; then, the human will have to submit to his creature. The engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis co-founded and currently chairs this Singularity University. He participated in the creation of several companies in the space field, including Planetary Resources, devoted to mining on asteroids, these “mountains of flying resources” (Dixit Mr Eric Drexler). Like the engineer Elon Musk, boss of Tesla (which produces electric cars in an almost automated way), SpaceX (which produces space shuttle launchers) and the start-up Neuralink (which aims to produce electronic components that can be integrated into the human brain), he believes that the future of humans is not on Earth. Like Musk, maybe he dreams of colonizing Mars, to continue this project imagined and started long before they were born and of which they are becoming the new apostles. But before leaving with their thousands of small and large toys for other skies, they still have the task of artificializing the Earth and the human body even more with the illusion of achieving perfect control. These are two things that go hand in hand, as the remodeling of humans in order to adapt to the degradation of the Earth goes hand in hand with the remodeling of the human necessary to adapt to extraterrestrial living conditions.

The chemist Paul Crutzen helped to popularize the concept of the “Anthropocene”, this new geological era in which the common human being (Homo sapiens) would mark with its seal. Consistent with this assessment, he is also a proponent of geoengineering. He sees it as a solution to the problem of climate change that the industrial lifestyle has created and insists on maintaining. “Geoengineering” projects the manipulation of the entire planet. It is based on the principle that the climate system is controllable and thatHomo industrialis, equipped with its technoscience, can modify it as it pleases. This project has roots in the 1950s, where, mainly in the United States and Russia, the aim was to discover new weapons or, more simply, to seed clouds so that it would rain where the ground lacked water. It is a technique, more or less random, used today in China with this intention, to fight against the spread of the desert. Faced with the climate problem, the ambition is wider. The idea is in particular to modify the albedo, that is to say the reflectivity of the Earth, and therefore to alter the flow of solar energy and the flow of infrared energy radiated by the Earth's surface, either by reducing the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) content, so that a greater quantity of infrared radiation can escape to space (for example by capturing and sequestering gas in geological cavities or by fertilizing oceans with iron sulfate), or by increasing the albedo in order to lower the amount of solar energy absorbed by the Earth (in particular by diffusing aerosols or dust into the stratosphere). Crutzen has a preference for the second option. Diamandis, who is more entrepreneurial, hopes for the first: capturing CO2 and sequestering it, not in plankton or in the subsoil, but in new goods. There are other equally imaginative proposals, such as that of the astronomer Roger Angel, such as that of the astronomer Roger Angel to install a shield of mirrors in space in order to reflect solar radiation before it reaches Earth.

J. Craig Venter, on the other hand, believes that the solution to this problem (and many others) lies in the manufacture of artificial organisms, in this case algae whose DNA has been modified in order to make them unalterable CO2 sponges. Venter, a biochemist by training, businessman and a big fan of speed driving a Tesla, founded the company Synthetic Genomics, which works on the mass production of these artificial plants, and the J. Craig Venter Institute, a research center in synthetic biology, this “promising” technoscience, this “promising” technoscience (like all technoscience) at the intersection of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and computer science. The explicit ambition is to force nature to do what it does not do and to manufacture “beings” that never existed. It's a kind of Lego game, but with living things instead of ordinary pieces of plastic as bricks. Recently, Venter partnered with Diamandis and the surgeon-entrepreneur Robert J. Hariri to create the company Human Longevity, whose aim is, as its name suggests, to extend the lifespan of healthy humans. To do this, she is particularly interested in the genomes of cancers and cancer patients. She is already offering, for a fee, to sequence your complete genome, in order to better assess the “risks” incurred and contained in your body, and then, with your doctor or genetic counsellor, the possibilities of preventing or curing the diseases that you would be, from birth, predisposed to contract. The central premise is that everything would reside in genes, that every human being would be reduced to a sum of genes, which would be simple “programs” that could be easily reprogrammed.

Venter is one of the scientists who set out to sequence the DNA of the human genome in the 1990s. His team achieved this thanks to automatic sequencing devices created by the American biotechnologist and entrepreneur Leroy Hood. Like Venter, the latter is now proposing, with his company Arivale, to “optimize” your well-being through the scientific analysis of your genome, your intestinal microbiome, your saliva, your blood and your “lifestyle”. Such an “in-depth” examination will allow him to reveal to you who you really are, and you will then know, following the advice of a coach, what you will have to do, how you will have to live, to achieve “scientific well-being”.

No doubt there are other companies of this kind. The idea behind all of them, and in fact underlies the entire genetic enterprise, is that the human body is imperfect by mechanical standards. It is full of “bugs” that should be “fixed.” Kurzweil, Diamandis, Venter, Hood and others (for example Gregory Stock, George M. Church, Lee Silver or, in France, Bernard Debré and André Choulika) don't just imagine being able to treat people one day front that they are not sick, thanks to gene therapies. Their ambition is also and above all to “improve” the human body (physical performance, “intelligence”, memory, etc.) and, more generally,Human species, through genetic engineering. It's about doing “better” than nature (or God?) and thus to take control of human evolution. This perfectionist design corresponds, in fact, to the old eugenic program, which is inherent in the hybridization between Darwinism and the religion of progress and which, in order to be successful, does not intend to exclude either cloning or ectogenesis.^[5].

***

These few highly publicized and media figures are certainly enlightened, but they are not preaching in the desert. Their words are relayed and audible in the societies where they are expressed, because they make sense. They do not question technoscience and its mechanistic, reductionist, rationalist and utilitarian foundations; they bring them to their peak. They do not question the progressive promise of the best of all worlds; on the contrary, they perpetuate the hope of an indefinite improvement in the human condition, until programming its abolition. They do not challenge the established order, but raise huge amounts of capital, bringing about an unprecedented fusion between industrial interests, state interests and advertising propaganda.

They — especially men — are the heralds of a technoscience which, from its origins and its founding desire to rationalize ancient natural magic (Descartes, Bacon, Boyle, Galileo, Condorcet, etc.), has aimed at modifying the human condition and, in order to do so, to take absolute control of it; and which, from the beginning, has been part of relationships of domination that it has helped to strengthen, for the benefit of powerful people who are increasingly familiar with his rational method. At the idea of the natural world that he could master, Homo industrialis has always associated that of human communities themselves as an object of domination, as a homogeneous and inert mass that can be manipulated entirely. So that technical rationality, as the rationality of domination, ended up being applied to everything: to the “body” of nature, to the human body, to the “social body”.

Si Everything is “machine”, if more nought is not constituted according to the categories specific to living subjectivity, but everything According to the abstractions of mathematized science, then understanding the most complex things consists in breaking them down into simple elements, then reconstructing them, conceptually and concretely, according to their model or according to their model or according to their imagination and desire for power^[6]. It is the whole of nature, inorganic and organic, which is a “machine” subject to this process of decomposition and reconstruction within the industrial automaton; it is the body of the worker that is a “machine” disaggregated in organs and qualities, in order to be recomposed scientifically into a docile and effective “work force”; it is the consumer's body that is a “machine” whose gears are the impulses, cleverly reassembled into this “drive force” attracting him like a fly in the glut of industrial consumerism; it's the “productive body” which is a “machine” divided into fragmented workers and reconstituted into a “global worker” by scientific management; it is the body of everyone which is a “machine” composed of neurons, genes, atoms, bits whose recombination by mechanics must lead to its unlimited “increase”; it is the “social body”, finally, which is a “machine” atomized into individuals isolated from each other, restructured by the “intelligent” Leviathan and left to the abstract automations of bureaucracy and purportedly self-regulating market.

By dethroning the human and enthroning technoscience, these processes converge to make the inhabitants of industrialized territories the powerless workings of the mass power they produce and which becomes alien to them, dominates them and finally dooms them to complete dissolution.

***

Industrialism — and its counterpart, consumerism — is artificialism. The more its influence is amplified, the more the living is withering away. This is a major trend due to the desire ofHomo industrialis to control everything, according to a mechanistic and experimental conception of nature reducing everything in it, including humans, to a raw material or modeling clay. It is a deadly path that precipitates the course of things. Death before time.

Every human will die out. No human society is eternal. Humanity will join the void. The Earth, we are told, will eventually be absorbed by the Sun. Like clouds, individually and collectively, humans are therefore only passing through. It is a fact, as obvious as it is unfathomable. Where do we come from? What are we doing on Earth? How should we live? What happens after death? Myths and religions are the imaginary answers of societies to these undecidable questions that none can avoid asking. What do they say Homo industrialis ? “We are here to transcend what made us and what we belonged to at the beginning: Earth, the natural drift of living beings. We are there to totally dominate it and get out of it. To bend it to our whims, do everything we think we can with it.”

Death before time, by nuclear war or the occurrence of massively contagious “bio-errors”. Death before time, by the poisoning of living environments, water, air, land. Death before time, due to irreversible climate change. Death before time, through the destruction of soils and the degradation of species.

None of this is troubling Kurzweil and company, “transhumanist” technoprophets or simple progressives, whose blissful optimism is matched only by the rigidity of socio-political conformity. Technoscience will be able to remedy this. Technoscience always has the answer to everything. She did; she will know how to undo. It has altered or destroyed; it will know how to restore or recreate, and even create new things better than nature ever knew how to do. Let those who know do it, they repeat over and over again. Leave it to us.

However, those who say they know have given themselves the power to do as they please for a long time. While they do not know, they only have the illusion of knowing, that they do without really knowing what they are doing, reaffirming that they know what they are doing with all the more insistence that experience constantly demonstrates their irreducible inability to know what they are doing.

However, it has been a long time since the Christian West, after having distrusted the Libido sciendi, set off like a sleepwalker led by the song of those who said they knew without knowing what they were doing. Granting the best conditions to technoscience virtuosos. Arranging the free deployment of their libido : immunizing it against any critical reflection, any collectively defined self-limitation. Seeking salvation in the providential effects of the progress of their magic. Denying, like them, and with ever more stubbornness, any principle of reality. Of this reality, which, as it gives itself to being and living in a common way, has always been wrong in their minds for simply being what it was: unbearable not to be what for them it should be, perfect only in its adjustment to their blind modernism.

***

Who seeks to shape the world,

I see, will not succeed.

The world, a spiritual vessel, cannot be shaped.

Whoever shapes it will destroy it.

Whoever has it will lose it.

— Lao Tzu^[7]

For some time now, the impression has prevailed that capitalist society is being drawn into a suicidal drift that nobody consciously wants but to which everyone contributes [...], [...] a series of catastrophes at all levels and on a global scale, which seems to threaten the very survival of humanity...

— Anselm Jappe^[8]

We tried to live beyond Earth. Now we need to learn to live on it.

— Kenneth White^[9]

O you who seek the Supreme Good in the depths of knowledge, in the turmoil of business, in the darkness of the past, in the labyrinths of the future, in the depths of tombs and beyond the stars, do you know its name? The name of what is One and All?

Her name is Beauty.

— Friedrich Hölderlin^[10]

The pressure of my foot on the ground triggers a thousand emotions,

They taunt all my efforts to tell the story.

— Walt Whitman^[11]

Respect for man by man cannot be based on certain particular dignities that humanity would attribute to itself, because, then, a fraction of humanity can always decide that it embodies these dignities in a more eminent way than others. Rather, a kind of principled humility should be established at the beginning; man, beginning by respecting all forms of life outside his own, would protect himself from the risk of not respecting all forms of life within humanity itself.

— Claude Lévi-Strauss^[12]

***

No human can have a taste of life without imagining themselves to be a little something that belongs in this world, rather than something less than nothing, an insignificant artifact. Pride is born with its pretension to be bigger than it really is, bigger than its peers. This ambition becomes excessive when he sees himself bigger than anything outside him; when he starts to believe that everything he imagines could and should be achieved. Such is theHomo industrialis : a presumptuous, greedy and calculating being who intends to appropriate the whole world and shape it according to his ideal, the machine. Because he does not like what is disordered and uncontrollable, unpredictable and uncertain, in other words what chance has given birth to and which lives. He must therefore “bring life back to a combination of mechanical phenomena.”^[13] ”, to reduce every living being to a thing, an object, an insignificant artifact. Hence his fascination with death, “the only certain fact in existence.^[14].”

Bioengineers, beyond their quest for adamic perfection, imagine that one day they will be able to recreate life. Ex Nihilo ; but how could they, being unable, even in their intellectual approaches, to apprehend and define it other than by denying it? Cyber engineers call “immortality” what would no longer exist except in the form of information circulating in a network of algorithmic machines, so what would be, strictly speaking, dead (deprived of any sensation of living). Robotics engineers, perhaps inspired by Victor Frankenstein, aim to make alive what, being composed only of inorganic matter, could never be alive. Geoengineers want to take control of the climate system, while, like any human, they are unable to control their organism and the course of their lives. Aerospace engineers are concerned with ways to leave the only place in the universe where you are sure that the conditions are right for life (at least, for now...). As much as they are, these machine idolaters will only succeed in producing chimeras and calamities. Because to seek to master the living is to fight it, it is to seek to defeat it and, in the secret of hearts, unknown to hearts themselves, to destroy it.

Industrial societies, whose shape owes much to the long and close collaboration between sovereigns, merchants and mechanics, have already left their mark on the world. The destruction of nature and its replacement by an anti-nature is well advanced; the erasure of cultures, languages, knowledge and skills of communities that were also along the way. The unquenchable progressive promise is an incentive to continue along the same path, with the horizon of artificialization — and therefore the annihilation — of humanity itself. This is what supporters of the “post” or “transhumanist” movement explicitly aim at, as the articles in this issue tend to show. It is not enough for “cosmophagous” and “humanist” societies — seeking to disjoin themselves from nature — to continue their devastating conquest of the Earth considered as an exoplanet (Frédéric Neyrat); by exacerbation of a scientism whose roots lie in Christianity and Greek philosophy, which is rooted in Christianity and Greek philosophy, and therefore against common sense and the world of life (Michel Barrillon), it is a question of putting an end to the human element (Christian Goel). Din), to put an end to the body (David Le Breton), to put an end to death (Jacques Luzi).

These ideas are similar to the delirium of a madman seeking, by a strange somersault, to get out of himself. How can a human being believe that they can do without nature and the Earth? How can he believe he can disincarnate and kill death?

The body is not a burden. It is through our entire body, from head to toe, that we are in the world, “insofar as we perceive the world [and others] with our body^[15] ”. Without a body, how do you know if you are alive? How do you taste life? How do you take root in reality? Without a body, how can we learn, knowing that, whatever we learned—everything must be learned—we always learn “by body”? There can be no spirit — and therefore thought — that is detached from a body. The end of the body would mean the end of being-together—and thus of history—because everything that imagines a human community is incorporated.

A human being, having nothing to perceive except what he has made, can only wither away. Because who could — and who would really want to — live continuously like a male astronaut in the hermetic world of a spaceship? Humans are human, can only understand themselves as human and become aware of themselves as human beings, only in belonging to and in confrontation with a sensitive world of which they are not the author and which remains a mystery for them.^[16] ; that is to say nature, towards which he should then be humble. Humans would hardly know how to live without humility; without humility, humus, the fruit of a wild nature, will disappear. “We are cosmic elements^[17] ”, says Jean Giono. We are in/in nature. So we really need it. This need, real humans feel it all the more because they live in industrialized countries; it is at the heart of the tourist industry, which nevertheless contributes to the extension of the artificial.

Contrary to this commodification of what is left of sensitivity, other relationships between humans and with nature are possible. They are even necessary. To deny it is to consent, if not to adhere to, the nihilism ofHomo industrialis and to the total annihilation that he completed at a rapid pace.