ABSTRACT
It can be argued that many Enlightenment thinkers conceived of the natural world as an object for manipulation and control; and they therefore advanced an instrumental, manipulative reason to realize their project of technological domination. But the predisposition to view the natural world in “objectivistic,” mechanistic, and mathematical terms necessarily entailed viewing humankind as machine-or object-like as well, and, as a result, suitable for exploitation. Any such one-sided view of so complex and far-reaching a phenomenon is bound to be an oversimplification, but let us assume there is some truth to this characterization for our purposes here.
