La differenza natura-cultura e il rapporto vita-lavoro tra Bateson e Marcuse

The present essay wants to investigate the relationship, ambiguous and interested, through which nature, bìos, its autonomous and complex system, have become an object of the conscious productivity of work, that has shaped the capital economy in the western world. To limit the subject to the most essential issues, which derive from enviromental problems of our time, and from the urgency they pose to globalized economy, the authors through which this essay intends to examine the ecological problem, and its work-nature relationship, are essentially two: Gregory Bateson and Herbert Marcuse. These are two authors who wrote in the same years, and in a time not far from ours, that first discussed the matter (at least in philosophy) of the impact of human tecnology on nature, placing at the same time the problem that this determines for our existence, for our health, and for our “happiness”. They are also the authors that, coming from different studies, and having on this matter two approaches, as I shall try to show, very distant, nontheless, they apparetly ‘met’ on the urgence to rethink our relationship (“our” meaning Western civilization) with the world and with the living, that at the end of the sixties went throught the critics of capitalism, making the ecological issues their own in an original way.