When speaking about the imitation of nature from a philosophical perspective, one traditionally refers to the subject area of philosophical aesthetics.1 Thus, Plato and, in his succession, Aristotle, defined the arts as an imitation of natural models.2 This incurred a negative connotation, insofar as art, at least in Plato’s case, was thereby committed to a second-degree representation of the ideas already represented in the natural world. Since the era of Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) at the end of the eighteenth century, the theory of art as imitation has often been considered to have been overcome and discredited as secondary, as the aesthetics of genius emphasized the unprecedented originality of art.3 In contrast, imitation was regarded as a sign of negligible dilettantism.4
In this context, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg even spoke of an “overcoming of the mimesis-bond” in modern times, even if this was still in the “phase-out of the agonal process.”5 For Blumenberg, the beginning of this “agonal process” in which the “mimesis-bond” dissolves is not to be found in the pathos of freedom toward the end of the eighteenth century, but rather in
As convincing as this thesis may be, it is fair to say—and this is the thesis of the following reflection—that the paradigm of imitatio naturae, of imitating nature is by no means in an “agonal process” in modernity. Rather, the concept of imitatio naturae is beginning to reassert itself, especially since the “mimetic turn” or “return” in the second half of the twentieth century.8 This time, however, it is not limited to the space of the aesthetic, but is an all-encompassing feature of modern developments concerning the cultural, but most especially, the technological sphere. Perhaps due to its omnipresence in a wide variety of sectors, it no longer stands out to us, to the point that one might even speak of the idea of a “mimetic unconscious.”9
The following reflection is far from merely trying to prove this empirically. One could mention phenomena such as artificial intelligence, whose founding text, published by Alan Turing in 1950, characteristically outlines an “imitation game” at its outset.10 This game has come to be known as the Turing
The list could easily be extended, thus calling Blumenberg’s thesis into question solely by the sheer abundance of examples, especially since the second half of the twentieth century. In the following, the aim is rather to understand why, for structural reasons, the imitation of nature cannot simply be filed away as a world-historical “progress in the consciousness of freedom,”14 a thesis to which Blumenberg implicitly commits himself with his approach (thesis 1). Apart from whether this thesis is appropriate, at least one of Blumenberg’s unjustified presuppositions—according to the second thesis of my chapter—is that imitation is an act of unfreedom and that freedom can therefore only be realized in the isolationistic form of autonomy. As I intend to prove, freedom can consist of imitation of or orientation toward a given phenomenon, whether it be natural or not (thesis 2). Thirdly, imitation of living nature can, under certain circumstances, be an excellent way of responding to the environmental challenges posed by the Anthropocene, which requires a posthumanistic or “postanthropocentric” thinking achievable precisely only through mimesis (thesis 3).15
1 Aristotle’s Concept of Techné as Imitation and Completion of Physis
Already in Aristotle, the imitation of nature by technology is not understood as a merely passive and inferior reproduction of the natural, when he defines their relationship in Physics, even though the Greek terms have a much broader range of meaning than their English loanwords: “Generally art (techné) in some cases completes (epiteleî) what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates (mimeîtai) nature.”16 Unlike Plato in the tenth book of the Politeia, Aristotle even connects imitation with a superiority of the artistic over the natural. In contrast to Blumenberg, one should not conclude that “the overarching component lies in the element of ‘imitation’”17—and that the “completion” of what “nature cannot bring to a finish” is only a subordinate, insignificant moment compared to the imitation which negates autonomy.
In this part of Physics, Aristotle is certainly interested in integrating the realm of techné into that of nature almost to the point of identity. To prove this structural equality of physis and techné, Aristotle gives the example of a house: If one imagines the house to be a natural object that had grown of its own accord, the parameters for considering its construction would still be the
At the same time, Aristotle does not lose sight of the difference between physis and techné. Aristotle’s insistence on structurally equating physis and techné is accompanied by an emphasis on a fundamental difference between the two areas.21 He announces this in the above quotation by referring to the possibility of technically perfecting the natural, which Blumenberg neglected. In a certain respect, the fact that “art (téchné) in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish” attests to nature’s inability (adunateî) to accomplish the form (entelecheía) or goal (telos) that is to be purposefully achieved.22 Techné is supposed to overcome this powerlessness by leading the movement begun by nature to its end or goal after all.
This means that (1) the autonomous movement of nature, which contains itself through self-causality and teleology, is broken up by means of the techné. The self-identity of nature is suspended by the technical act that imitates or further elaborates on its movement by means of a web of relations between nature and the techné that expands it. Conversely, this means that (2), in relation to the techné, that which is artificially produced does not represent anything self-contained either. On the one hand, it receives the efficient cause from something that is naturally given merely in order to continue the
Aristotle, between the lines as it were, here advocates for a union of physis and techné that makes perfection possible. Even in passive imitation, this position does not ignore the difference and the added value of each for the other. According to Aristotle, the new does not arise by acceding to a space of possibility of absolute alterity, but rather in the converging union of the different domains, which allows the other, the new, to emerge of its own accord.
How this emergence is to be understood more precisely, not least in terms of the theory of science with a view to nature and technology, which Aristotle only hints at here, can be understood with reference to a modern thinker, namely with reference to Georges Canguilhem’s work La connaissance de la vie, published in 1952, in which he discusses the historical relationship between organism and machine. Here, the prehistory of a discourse of mimesis emerges even more clearly, which can be understood precisely as an opportunity for an ecologically sustainable, posthumanist Anthropocene.
2 Canguilhem’s Understanding of Technology as a “Universal Biological Phenomenon”
In the chapter “Machine et organisme” of La connaissance de la vie,24 Canguilhem sought to reveal the history of a multilayered interrelationship
Canguilhem seeks to plausibilize his thesis that there are mutually dependent relationships between the organism and the machine on the one hand, and technology and science on the other, in four successive steps of argumentation. First, Canguilhem shows that “the mechanistic explanation of organ functions is historically … based on the construction of automata.”26 To this end, Canguilhem does not only go back to the iatromechanical school of the seventeenth century and Descartes, who sought to describe and explain the human organism mechanistically, using the example of the physician Giorgio Baglivi. He sees such starting points even in Aristotle’s work De motu animalium, which describes the organs animals have for movement as “organa” and compares them with parts of war devices such as the catapult. Canguilhem blames a process of displacement for the fact that such a parallelization and even a reversal of the mimetic relationship between organism and machine could have occurred, namely that the organism only realized abstract technical-mechanical principles. Due to the storage of energy, a hydraulic automaton, for example, merely gives the impression of being an “automaton,” a self-moving thing. The delayed setting-in-motion of an effect conceals the external driving force: “It is this shift (décalage) between the time of storage and the time of release of energy that leads to the dependence between mechanical performance and the action of a living being falling into oblivion.”27
In the second step, using Descartes as an example, Canguilhem tries to make clear the implications of this “exchanged” imitative relationship in the history of ideas. By understanding the organism on the basis of mechanistic causality, the finality or teleology of the organic, still emphasized by Aristotle, was blunted. But if, according to Canguilhem, “man negates all natural finality and regards all of nature, including obviously animate nature, as a means to an end,
Third, Canguilhem also identifies an overturning (se renverse) of the relationship between organism and mechanism at work that occurs with Descartes. For “in an organism one observes … phenomena of self-construction, self-preservation, self-regulation and self-repair. To the machine, on the other hand, the process of construction is alien; it needs the inventiveness of the mechanic.”30 Canguilhem must concede that the development of the organic realm is not fully subordinated by teleological forms to the same extent as the technical—even if the organism offers its own form of finality, which the machine does not. Here, phenomena of the monstrous, the pathological, and the deviant become central, phenomena that Aristotle still thought he could dismiss as errors related to technical production and as “an accidental cause (symbebekòs).”31 These phenomena precisely indicate that the organic realm, despite its undeniably teleological moments, possesses a freedom and openness to possibilities that are made particularly apparent by its deviation from final causality: “An organism thus has more scope for action than a machine. In the organism, there is less finality and more potentiality.”32 Canguilhem contends that the machine can only be understood with reference to the natural, namely by referring to the history of humanity and of life; its meaning arises from this natural history, without the freedom of the inventive thereby being restricted.33
Canguilhem’s fourth and final step is to underline this once again in a concluding reflection on the relationship between technology and science. Referring to §43 of Kant’s Critique of Judgement,34 Canguilhem calls for a
3
In a certain sense, both Aristotle and Canguilhem rub salt in the wound created by an understanding of technical freedom such as that represented by Blumenberg. In its detachment from all ties to nature, such an understanding must be questioned as to where it derives the possibilities of its freedom. In the literal sense, these possibilities would appear to be groundless, as they result from abandoning the paradigm of imitation.
The technical object and its development, however innovative it may be, are always bound up in contexts. This was emphasized above all by Canguilhem’s student Gilbert Simondon in his 1958 work Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, systematically following his teacher’s reflections on the concept of the “milieu.”39 Canguilhem understands living things in general, from cell to organ to organism, as being immersed in a “milieu,” as forming a unity of mutual constitution and therefore to be characterized by the basis it presents. Simondon, similarly, seeks to understand the technical object in relation to its environment. Against this backdrop, Simondon understands the man-machine relationship as an “inter-individual coupling (couplage) between man and machine”: “Man can be coupled to the machine as a being that participates in its regulation, not as a being that merely directs and uses it by incorporating it into the ensembles, or as a being that serves it by supplying it with material or elements.”40 Simondon assumes here a symbiosis between man and machine, so to speak, which leads to the fact that neither of the two interaction partners can exist on their own. Martina Heßler rightly emphasizes the proximity between Simondon’s approach to the philosophy of technology and Bruno Latour’s network theory, which sees the biosphere as being made up of irretrievably interwoven actors and agents.41
In addition to this interconnection of the machine with its external environment, Simondon—analogous to Canguilhem’s concept of the “milieu”42—also
Even if Simondon generally strives to maintain the difference between the natural and the technical, this description of technical objects leads him to liken them to natural organisms. At the same time, with this mimetic approach between the technical and the living, he points the way beyond an understanding of technology that is centered on the human subject, insofar as the human being is not simply understood as a user of technology who masters it and exists independently of it, but stands in a symbiotic relationship with it.
Simondon’s posthumanist or, more precisely, “postanthropocentric” view of technology ensures the autonomy and innovativeness of the technical object precisely in the way it imitates central structures of the living. However, the imitation of the holistic integration of technical objects into the environment is by no means accompanied by claims about its sustainability, as is the case with the life cycles of the natural world.44 On the contrary, there is also the possibility that the “too perfect” imitation and above all the holistic integration of technical objects into the natural environment can harm it in a lasting and unsustainable way. The Anthropocene debate, which emerged at the turn of the millennium, has clearly drawn attention to the fact that human activities, especially those related to its technical products, have irreversibly inscribed themselves in the biosphere of our planet in a largely harmful way.45 As
In this respect, the normative claims advanced by the interdisciplinary research field of biomimetics47—which Canguilhem understood as early as 1965 to be an adequate practical implementation of his definition, outlined in “Machine et organisme”, of the relationship between natural life and the technical object48—must be examined more closely in the following. Approaches to technological development that seek to imitate nature’s life forms and to integrate the resulting technical objects back into nature can usually claim innovative potential for themselves. However, they are by no means automatically accompanied by a promise of sustainability, as the “Life Cycle Assessment” to be carried out for technical products demonstrates.49
4 The Ethical Claim Regarding a Technical Imitation of Nature in Biomimetics
As has been seen, propagating an orientation of technology toward nature only appears to be a lack of freedom if nature is understood as a static natura
However, this raises the question of sustainability and thus the normativity of this approach, especially in the face of the challenges of the Anthropocene. Certainly, one does not immediately fall into a naturalistic fallacy (concluding what ought to be from what is)53 if one normatively propagates nature as a possible space for orientation in technical action. As Henry Dicks has rightly pointed out, in the first place, an orientation toward the functional principles of nature does not mean “that doing so follows logically from the nature of Nature,”54 insofar as scientific-technical action is still free. In the second
The interdisciplinary research field of biomimetics is well aware of this need for an “external,” additional normative evaluation of its developed products and is therefore increasingly integrating sustainability researchers and ethicists into its collaborative, interdisciplinary research.57 The concept of the “biomimetic promise,” coined by Von Gleich et al.58 and forming the core normative content of biomimetics, is not a self-perpetuating one. Admittedly, the normative aspect of biomimetic developments, “that is, a qualitative promise of better, more ecological, low-risk and more appropriate solutions” to technical problems,59 is derived from its orientation on optimized biological models that fit perfectly into the natural environment. Furthermore, because their inspiration from biological models flows into technical applications, biomimetic solutions ought to have the specific potential to contribute to sustainable technology development. However, even if biological models have evolved extraordinary properties in the course of 3.8 billion years of evolution,60 this
(1) The example of the cherry tree and its sustainable life cycle mentioned by McDonough and Braungart61 may be an illustration of sustainable, harmonious integration into the natural environment. However, there is a limited extent to which it can be a model for imitation in the production of sustainable technical products, since the interface between the natural and technical “milieu” is quite different from that between different natural entities, not least because of the different materials used in each case.62 Even if, for example, chemical risk management63 attempts to remedy this situation, there is always a residual uncertainty as to whether the technologies developed are unproblematic or dangerous with regard to their interface with the natural environment. In view of this lack of knowledge, which can never be completely resolved, Hans Jonas introduced the concept of a “heuristics of fear (Heuristik der Furcht)” in his main ethical work The Principle of Responsibility, which argues in favor of rejecting new technologies in case of doubt in order to preserve the possibilities of the present for future generations. Even if this principle in Jonas’ work is more oriented toward the protection of future human life and can thus be described as anthropocentric, there is nothing fundamentally opposed to a “postanthropocentric” or biocentric extension of this concept, so that it can still be applied under the intensified environmental ethical questions of the protection of nature in the Anthropocene, for example to decide on the imitability of certain biological principles.64
(2) However, the ethical consideration of technologies that imitate nature is not limited to their supposed physical impact on nature and humans. They must also be considered in relation to other, conventional technical objects. Biomimetic approaches always have to raise the scientific question of whether the biomimetic product at hand is more sustainable than a comparable conventional product. To answer this question, biomimetics not only has to resort
(3) Last but not least, we must also take into account that technologies that imitate nature stand in a relationship to humans and society and must therefore be ethically reflected upon in this regard. Mark Coeckelbergh, for example, notes with reference to the example of social robotics that such nature-mimicking technologies are always at the same time concerned “with the making of human, social, cultural, and political meanings (and the very claim that the robot is an ‘other’ is one of these meanings that has political significance and that must be problematized).”67 For him, technologies that imitate living beings and especially humans, as is the case for social robotics, are neither simply neutral instruments nor absolute “others” that act in complete independence from the human being like another, alien person. In this sense, he distances himself from his understanding of posthumanism. Rather, he understands these technologies as “instruments-in-relation,” almost in the sense of Simondon, without naming him in his explanations: “Humans and robots are entangled in the many ways outlined; they are internally and deeply related.”68 This can lead to problems of societal acceptance, especially in the case of technologies that imitate nature, as these attack and blur conventional ontological categories accorded to objects. In this respect, fields as diverse as the natural sciences and the humanities, not to mention the users of such technologies, are called upon to reflect not only on the possible implications of these technologies for theories of sustainability and environmental ethics, but
5 Outlook: The Simultaneous Safeguarding of Technical Freedom and the Diversity of Natural-Cultural Relational Realities
The fact that technology, as was already noted by Aristotle, involves the imitation and even the perfection of nature is not to be criticized as a paradigm that was historically overcome as part of a long struggle favoring freedom and originality. The opposition that Blumenberg believed necessary to establish turns out to be illusory. Technology in the Anthropocene that is to meet the current environmental ethical challenges must be posthumanistic and “postanthropocentric,” and this it can be in its imitating nature. Sustainable imitation of nature in the Anthropocene is precisely possible to the extent that it is free, just as freedom and originality in the Anthropocene are possible when they are imitative and integrated into an environment. Technology must adaptively integrate itself into the natural environment without ignorantly dominating the natural. But by taking this to heart, technology is an imitative image of life itself, as Canguilhem and his pupil Simondon have already indicated.
To use Whiteheadʼs words, life is “a bid for freedom,” a striving for novelty and originality; but life is at the same time not “a defining characteristic”: “The characteristic of life is a reaction adapted to the capture of intensity, under a large variety of circumstances.”69 Intensity, however, is a phenomenon that only occurs against a background and in comparison to it: life does not stand out absolutely as separate from its environment, but rather, despite its similarity to the environment, emerges as a more intense, more significant event in relation to it. But, to remain in the picture, what appears more intense, more significant in relation to its surroundings, always runs the risk of repressing them. Nevertheless, what appears more significant is dependent on its environment in many ways, not only in a physical sense, but also in a nonphysical, socio-cultural sense. The task of ethics in the face of such new technologies that imitate nature is precisely to consider and ensure these diverse relationships, without at the same time endangering the freedom and innovativeness of these technologies, but allowing both to go hand-in-hand.
The work leading to this publication was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—ExC-2193/1—390951807 as well as by the prime program of the German Academic Exchange Service (daad) with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (bmbf). I thank James Fisher and Kai Kobashi very much for correcting the English text.
See Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 13–46; Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 31–60.
See especially, Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der Deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik: 1750–1945, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), vol. 1.
See Friedrich Balke, Mimesis zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2018), 120–26.
Hans Blumenberg, “‘Nachahmung der Natur’: Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des Schöpferischen Menschen,” in Schriften zur Technik, ed. By Alexander Schmitz, and Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 86–125, 124. If not otherwise indicated, all translations from German or French are mine.
See, for example, Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1996), 139–262.
See, for example, Blumenberg, “Nachahmung,” 116–19.
See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. by Christoph Fynsk (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthumanism and Mimesis: An Introduction,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 1 (2022): 87–100,
See Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Mimetic Condition: Theory and Concepts,” CounterText 8, no. 1 (2022): 1–22,
See Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind lix, no. 236 (1950): 433–60, 433–34. See also N. Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis ii—Connections: A Dialogue Between Nidesh Lawtoo and Katherine Hayles,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 181–92, esp. 184–85,
See Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 2002); Thomas Marzi et al. Fragen zu Einer Biologischen Technik (Oberhausen: Karl Maria Laufen, 2018),
See Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois de l’imitation: Étude sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1890).
See
Georg W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, in cooperation with the German Research Foundation ed. by North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968ff.), vol. 18, 153.
See Martin Möller, Philipp Höfele, Andrea Kiesel, and Olga Speck, “Re-actions of Sciences to the Anthropocene: Highlighting Inter- and Transdisciplinary Practices in Biomimetics and Sustainability Research,” Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 9, no. 1 (2020): 9–11.
Aristotle, Physics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, 4th ed., ed. by Jonathan Barnes, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 32; bk. ii, par. 8, 199a15–16. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes: Typographies 2 (Paris: Galiliée, 1986), esp. 23f.
Blumenberg, “Nachahmung,” 86.
Aristotle, Physics, 32; bk. ii, par. 8, 199a32.
Aristotle, Physics, 33; bk. ii, par. 8, 199b28.
Aristotle, Physics, 32; bk. ii, par. 8, 199b4.
Aristotle elaborates on this difference between physis and techné at the beginning of the second book of his Physics in the context of his determination of the essence of physis; Aristotle, Physics, 19; bk. ii, par. 1, 192b–193b. See also Henry State, Techne Theory: A New Language for Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 65–84.
Aristotle, Physics, 32; bk. ii, par. 8, 199a15–16.
See Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes, 24, who speaks of a “productive mimesis.”
The chapter “Machine et Organisme,” however, is older. As Canguilhem notes in the preface, it goes back to a lecture given in 1946–47. Georges Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1952), 5.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 125.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 128.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 130–31.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 138.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 141.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 144.
Aristotle, Physics, 33; bk. ii, par. 8, 199a25.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 147.
See Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 150.
See Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 152. Canguilhem refers here to a passage in Kant in which he insists that—for example, in the production of a shoe—the most detailed knowledge about the nature of an object to be produced does not imply the technical ability to produce it. Immanuel Kant, Critik der Urteilskraft (Berlin and Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich, 1790; 2nd ed. 1793), B 175, A 173. While Kant might have in mind that the technical production process represents something added to knowledge, Canguilhem concludes that the productive originality of technology cannot be reduced to a scientific rationalization.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 157.
See Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien Einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus Neuen Gesichtspunkten (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1877), 136–38, 155–64.
In his central essay on the philosophy of technology, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter den Aspekten der Phänomenologie” (Lifeworld and Technization under the Aspects of Phenomenology) from 1963, Blumenberg assumes that the essence of technology is to be understood precisely in its relationship to history, that it consists of an omission of history. As he tries to make clear with the example of an electric doorbell, the functioning and thus also the essence of technology lies precisely in the fact that the processes of development and production are forgotten in its handling. According to Blumenberg, mechanization consists of a reduction and suppression of the scientific knowledge behind it. When we use technology, we do not think about how it works, and that is what makes it efficient. See Hans Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter den Aspekten der Phänomenologie,” in Schriften zur Technik, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2015), 163–202, esp. 187–202; Oliver Müller, “Natur und Technik als falsche Antithese. Die Technikphilosophie Hans Blumenbergs und die Struktur der Technisierung,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 115 (2008): 99–124, 114–20.
Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 158.
See Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 160–93.
Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d’existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 119–20.
See Martina Heßler, “Gilbert Simondon und die Existenzweise Technischer Objekte: Eine Technikhistorische Lesart,” Technikgeschichte 83, no. 1 (2016): 3–32, esp.27,
Like Simondon’s concept of the technical object, Canguilhem’s concept of the “milieu” of the living also assumes external and internal relationships: “From the biological point of view, it must be understood that between the organism and the environment there is the same relationship as between the parts and the whole within the organism itself. The individuality of the living being does not end at its ectodermal borders, any more than it begins at the cell.” Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie, 179.
Simondon, Du Mode d’existence des Objets Techniques, 15.
See Möller et al., “Re-actions of Sciences to the Anthropocene,” 9–11.
See Philipp Höfele, “The Changed Role of Anthropology in the Anthropocene,” in Emerging:“Moral” Technologies and the Ethical-Legal Challenges of New Subjectivities, ed. by Silvia Salardi and Michele Saporiti (Turin: Giappichelli, 2020), 125–44, 127–35,
See Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Of Times and Things: Technology and Durability,” in French Philosophy of Technology. Classical Readings and Contemporary Approaches, ed. by Sacha Loeve, Xavier Guchet, and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Cham: Springer, 2018), 279–98, 291–94.
On the meaning and different uses of the terms biomimetics, biomimicry, bioinspiration, and bionics, see Möller et al., “Re-actions of Sciences to the Anthropocene,” 3.
In the second edition (1965) of his work La Connaisance de la Vie, Canguilhem refers in a footnote at the end of the chapter “Machine et Organisme” to the discipline of “bionics”—established about ten years earlier in the United States, mainly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—which turned to the study of biological structures and systems in order to use them as models for technology. Georges Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie: Deuxième édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Librairie philosophique, 2015), 163.
See iso 14040, Environmental Management—Life Cycle Assessment—Principles and Framework (Berlin: Beuth, 2006).
See Franziska Bomski and Jürgen Stolzenberg, eds., Genealogien der Natur und des Geistes: Diskurse, Kontexte und Transformationen um 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), esp. 25–124; Michael Hampe, Erkenntnis und Praxis: Zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006), 127–31. On the one hand, Hampe distinguishes between a concept of nature that understands “everything that is part of the necessary coherence of laws or falls under necessary laws” as nature; on the other hand, he draws attention to a concept of nature that takes account of the historical, according to which—as in the case of the concept of natura naturans—“everything that happens ‘of its own accord’ without human planning and intentionality, i.e. also the random (Zufällige), which cannot be grasped by law,” is nature (127).
See Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1952), 124–59.
See Möller et al., “Re-actions of Sciences to the Anthropocene,” 2–5.
See David Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in The Essential Philosophical Works (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2011), 1–551, 409; bk. iii, sec. i, part i.
Henry Dicks, “The Philosophy of Biomimicry,” Philosophy & Technology 29, no. 3 (2016): 223–43, 239,
See Philipp Höfele, “Schelling—Goethe—Schopenhauer: Zur holistischen Betrachtung der Natur in der ‘Sattelzeit’ um 1800,” in Schopenhauer Liest Schelling: Freiheits- und Naturphilosophie im Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie, ed. by Philipp Höfele and Lore Hühn (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2021), 163–95.
Dicks, “The Philosophy of Biomimicry,” 239.
See Olga Speck, David Speck, Rafael Horn, Johannes Gartner, and Klaus Peter Sedlbauer, “Biomimetic Bio-Inspired Biomorph Sustainable? An Attempt to Classify and Clarify Biology-Derived Technical Developments,” Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 12, no. 1 (2017): 1–15.
Arnim von Gleich, Christian Pade, Ulrich Petschow, and Eugen Pissarskoi, Potentials and Trends in Biomimetics (Berlin: Springer, 2010).
Möller et al., “Re-actions of Sciences to the Anthropocene,” 5.
See Benyus, Biomimicry.
See William McDonough, and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 85; Dicks, “The Philosophy of Biomimicry,” 240.
See, for example, the complex task of Area C of the livMatS cluster of excellence, which deals with the technical implementation of concepts such as adaptation, repair, and multiredundancy. LivMatS, “Research Area C,” n.d.,
See Möller et al., “Re-actions of Sciences to the Anthropocene,” 8.
See Philipp Höfele, “New Technologies and the ‘Heuristics of Fear’: The Meaning and Prehistory of an Emotion in Jonas, Heidegger and Hegel,” Hungarian Philosophical Review 64, no. 1 (2020): 166–82, 166–71.
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Mark Coeckelbergh, “Three Responses to Anthropomorphism in Social Robotics: Towards a Critical, Relational, and Hermeneutic Approach,” International Journal of Social Robotics 14 (2021): 2049–61, 2058,
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