THE NATURAL, THE ARTIFICIAL, AND THE HUMAN: HISTORY OF SELF-DENIAL AND THE INTEREST OF HUMAN SAFETY

Abstract

The ancient distinction between φύσις and νόμος survives today in the differentiation between human (natural) intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI), though transformed by major conceptual shifts in the history of philosophy. The meaning of “nature” has evolved from self-originating and self-movable being to a phenomenally constructed domain of external experience, while the “artificial” has expanded from mere craftsmanship to the broader sphere of what is in general produced, constructed, or technologically generated to the basis of the constructed nature itself. At the same time, the very notion of human nature blurs the boundary: if the human being is itself natural, then the products of human creativity appear human-natural, complicating the basic distinction. Contemporary constructivist and post- structuralist theories have gone further, interpreting both nature and human intelligence as products of unconscious or discursive construction. In such frameworks, the natural–artificial distinction becomes illusory, and AI appears merely as a derivative construct of an already self-constructed human being. Yet this theoretical erasure of the natural undermines essential dimensions of human self-understanding and opens space for anti-human practical consequences. In contrast, a humanological perspective emphasizes the human being as the bearer of a fundamental interest of human safety, understood as the existential effort to preserve and ennoble its own existence and well-being. From this standpoint, the natural–artificial distinction has phenomenological and pragmatic necessity: it expresses a basic structural differentiation within human existence itself. The aim of this paper is to clarify and justify this distinction anew, particularly in relation to the ontological difference between human and artificial intelligence.