François Dagognet, a prolific French philosopher of the sciences, identifies a residual naturalism as the main obstacle to the full exploration and exploitation of life’s potentials. He traces the roots of ‘‘naturalism’’ to the Greeks who held that the artisan or artist imitates that which is – nature. Although man works on nature, he doesn’t change it ontologically because human productions never contain an internal principle of generation. From the Greeks to the present, a variety of naturalisms have held to the following axioms: (1) the artificial is never as good as the natural; (2) generation furnishes the proof of life (life is autoproduction); (3) homeostasis (autoregulation) is the golden rule. (..)

Dagognet argues that nature has not been natural, in the sense of being pure and untouched by human works, for millennia. More provocatively, he asserts that nature’s malleability offers an ‘‘invitation’’ to the artificial. Nature is a blind bricoleur, an elementary logic of combinations, yielding an infinity of potential differences. These differences are not prefigured by final causes and there is no latent perfection seeking homeostasis. If the word ‘‘nature’’ is to retain a meaning, it must signify an uninhibited polyphenomenality of display. Once understood in this way, the only natural thing for man to do would be to facilitate, encourage, accelerate its unfurling: thematic variation, not rigor mortis.

//Paul Rabinow, Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality