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There can be no doubt that Erich Hörl's thinking proceeds from a very steady and conscientious meditation—rumination, even, absorption and digestion—of Aristotle's famous foundational formula: the human being is the animal to whom nature has given the logos, that is to say, language. Language differs from voice (phonē), which other animals also have and which signals affects. The logos does not signal affects but signifies concepts that are subject to debate. Accordingly, voice announces joy or pain, speech names good and evil, just and unjust, sensations or sensibilities (aisthesis) that, by themselves, establish the associations (or communities) constituted by family members and citizens.

Elsewhere, Aristotle shows that the logos is what allows for exercising technai, for producing things that nature does not provide. A technē—what later, following the Latin, was translated as “art”—is the production of a work based on a reflected knowledge and with an end in sight. Situated beside the domain of action, where virtue (aretē), that is, ultimately, the quality of the agent, is at stake, the domain of production puts the quality of products, their effectiveness, at stake. This effectiveness can have contrasting properties: the art of medicine, for example, can produce a recovery or its contrary because the logos allows for knowing a thing and its negation or privation.

The human being, then, is the animal whom nature provides with the possibility of knowledge with a view to effecting works that are prescribed neither by nature itself nor by virtuous disposition—which (abbreviating somewhat outrageously albeit admissibly in this context) allows us to discern what is just.

This possibility is given by nature, by physis. That is the topic of Hörl’s meditation. Physis endows humans with a capacity that exceeds the mere exercise of what belongs to physis. In other words, the nature of the human being implies an excess over nature. Should we say “nature of the human being” or “nature in the human being”? Everything leads us to think that the two should remain united.