ABSTRACT
In today’s Western society, a form of dynamics has developed which by now seems to have pervaded many areas of human existence throughout many parts of the world. These are the dynamics of science, technology and economics. They continually set in motion upheavals that affect both the social life of modern societies, as well as their relationship to nature. In particular, they have led to the global raw material and environmental problems we find ourselves confronted with today. As a part of these dynamics, the scientific logos has to a very large extent infringed upon our existence, and particularly on our relationship to nature. Since the extensive mechanisation of the world, the existence logoi of our society have been, in a manner of speaking, saturated with the effects (partially also by the thought and perception structures) of the scientific logos.1 But how did these dynamics come about? They cannot originate from a science that has no further goal than the production of inter-subjectively compelling statements. This type of science was held as the ideal in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Even the science of modern times, striving to theoretically recognise the laws of certain processes, did not by necessity have to infringe on social life. Nonetheless, the tendency to such infringements by modern natural sciences has been written into their programme essentially since the beginning – ever since the experiment with its invention of technical apparatuses began to accompany the generation of scientific results. This programme has its origin in specific concepts of the relationship between science and life which belong to the essence logos – that is to say, it has its origin in certain interpretations of what the essence logos consists of. The roots of this programme will be our primary concern in the following – at least in so far as they are simultaneously intertwined with the roots of the current environmental crisis.
