Introduction

The past year's lectures illustrated planet Gaia's mechanisms of self-regulation and revealed, through an analysis of the fascinating work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the limits of the mechanicistic worldview. It should be clearer to us today, then, how the classic paradigms of science and philosophy imprison our thinking, making us unable to fully comprehend the system of relations between man and nature.

The 2008 lecture program will delve deeper into these themes and include the participation of eminent biologists, naturalists and philosophers. While embarking from different areas of study, these scholars reach similar conclusions, that will help us move forward in our search for knowledge.
From Plato to Descartes, philosophy and science have developed through the processes of separating and distinguishing, and for this reason today we still view the relation between man and nature as one of opposing entities existing on separate levels. This is perhaps the most deep-rooted reason for our incapacity to envision a development of man taking place while respecting the environment.

The grave environmental problems we will face in the near future demand that we overcome an enormous inertia, which is generated not only by pressure from enormous economic interests but also, and perhaps more importantly, by the lack of instruments of thought that will enable us to fully comprehend our fundamental flaw: that we think of the environment from the point of view of Man, and not of Man from the point of view of the environment.

In 19-century biology, life itself was defined as the organism's capacity to resist external forces; we will learn instead that the process of ageing is a genetically determinable phenomenon, inscribed in the very life of which it represents simultaneously its development and its negation.
All this could be better understood if we were able to reason not in terms of entities but in terms of processes, if we were able to perceive the absolute identity, implicit in our world's complexity, that makes the whole exceed the sum of its parts. This is a different view of nature as something of which man is a part, as much as all other living and non-living creatures and things, in a continuously evolving process.

It won't be necessary to seek a purpose or an end, as the immanence of the process does not presuppose an origin or a sense. In this resides the true power of an ethics of becoming, which forces us to respect ourselves and the environment as though we were one.

Massimo Mercati