1 Introduction

There seems to be a growing awareness among philosophers of technology that empirically oriented approaches are unable to address all the essential dimensions of the influence of technologies on human beings and the world. As is well known, the so-called empirical turn in the philosophy of technology (Achterhuis 2001; Kroes and Meijers 2000) reacted against the “classical” philosophical approach to technology on the grounds that it was too speculative and failed to take specific technologies and human experiences with them into account. Yet both the world and human beings seem to be technologically conditioned in a way, or perhaps in ways that are general rather than particular and that are unaddressed or straightforwardly denied by the proponents of empirically oriented approaches. In recent years, many thinkers have tackled the imperfections of the empirically oriented philosophy of technology (e.g., Bosschaert & Blok 2022) and suggested ways of improving it (e.g., Romele 2021). A special issue of Foundations of Science was recently published (vol. 27, no. 1, March 2022) focusing precisely on the shortcomings of the empirically orientated philosophy of technology and seeking to “rethink technology in the Anthropocene”. The editors of the issue rightly ask whether “empirical-turn perspectives [can] make sufficient sense of the transcendental conditions of possibility of technology and technological culture as such–be they ontological, cultural-historical, politico-economic, or even earth-systemic” (Lemmens & Eede 2022, 96). Yet we also need to ask the question the other way round: are the ontological, cultural-historical, politico-economic, or earth-systemic factors conditioned by technology? If so, in what way(s) and how profoundly?

One of the most daring attempts to think through the general impact of technology has been that of Vincent Blok, and so here I will concentrate on his demand for the return of ontological inquiry regarding technology. Calling for this restoration, Blok brings the late philosophy of Martin Heidegger back into play, thus rehabilitating one of the thinkers that the empirical turn explicitly sought to leave behind.Footnote 1 Blok fully acknowledges that Heidegger did not pay enough attention to particular, or ontic, technologies, but he believes that this deficiency can be remedied. As he put it in a paper that he jointly authored with Jochem Zwier and Pieter Lemmens, we can analyse how ontic technological artifacts “‘mediate’ on an ontological level,” thus conditioning “how being reveals itself” (Zwier et al. 2016, 330). I have already formulated some doubts regarding this concept (Ritter 2021), but without subjecting it to appropriately detailed scrutiny. In this paper, I offer a more in-depth analysis. Such an examination is also possible because Blok has recently published several texts from which one can get a clearer idea of the approach that he proposes.

My aim is to explicate the key elements and general structure of Blok’s approach, and to indicate where it needs to be revised or developed in a different way. I should underscore that I do not seek to present my own ontologically oriented philosophy of technology. Rather, I intend to follow Blok’s line of reasoning to unlock some doors for further research. In some cases, I will pose questions to bring attention to unresolved problems while keeping them open for further inquiry. Also, as I want the reader to get the full picture of Blok’s approach, I cannot pay special attention to its particular aspects or components. My main intention is to show that his approach should be of interest not only to ontologically oriented scholars but to all philosophers, and non-philosophers too, who seek to clarify how particular technologies can change the world we live in, and not only one particular part or aspect of it. We definitely – perhaps even desperately – need a conceptual framework that will enable us to make sense of the interrelations between technological particularities and more general structures and/or processes, such as Earth or the world. For this reason, I hold Blok’s tireless efforts to clarify the ontological impact of technologies in high regard and worthy of critical attention.

I begin with two explanatory sections elucidating Blok’s call for a terrestrial turn in the philosophy of technology and his depiction of Earth itself. Subsequently, I identify both the practical and theoretical deficiencies of his approach. From a practical perspective, it does not offer a way of addressing the problem that he himself highlights, namely that of climate change, and does not fully appreciate the role of human agency in the Anthropocene. From the theoretical point of view, I question Blok’s conceptualisation of Earth – combining the ideas of Heidegger, Spinoza, and Gibson – as not doing justice to how we experience Earth facing climate change. As a next step, I identify the tension between the idea of the world as grounding worldly beings and the idea of technologies as founding a new world. Finally, I seek to sketch a more concrete ontological concept of the human-technology-world relation.

2 The Terrestrial Turn and Earth Itself

Blok identifies the inability to address climate change as the main blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology (Blok 2022a, 1). The face of Earth has been radically transformed under the influence of techno-scientific progress, and the ecological crisis, endangering planetary ecosystems, draws our attention to Earth as a necessary condition of our being (cf. Blok 2020, 353). Together with Lemmens and Zwier, Blok then suggests a terrestrial turn in the philosophy of technology (Lemmens et al. 2017). This turn, as outlined by Blok, remains framed by Heidegger’s concepts. Accordingly, Blok understands the emergence of the Anthropocene, i.e., of a new geological epoch in which humanity has become a geological force shaping Earth,Footnote 2 as a shift in our “being-in-the-world”: “the concept of ‘World’ is needed to understand the meaning of our ‘being-in-the-Anthropocene’ as distinct from our ‘being-in-the-Holocene’” (Blok 2021, 33). While in the Holocene, Earth remained forgotten, the Anthropocene urges us to experience our “being in the world” (Heidegger 1996) as conditioned by Earth.

Blok carefully reconstructs Heidegger’s ideas on Earth, seeking to precisely identify both the essentials of his approach and the elements in need of development on different lines. While agreeing with many of Heidegger’s ideas, Blok expresses his discontent with Heidegger’s characterisation of Earth not out of Earth itself (Blok 2016, 455). In this context, he takes issue with Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism (see esp. Meillassoux 2008), partially endorsing his criticism of correlationism yet seeking to avoid speculation (see the very title of Blok 2017a). Regarding Earth, Heidegger did not overcome correlationism, i.e., the idea that we cannot think anything separately from a subject (Meillassoux 2008, 409). Accordingly, “although Heidegger acknowledges the Earth as un-correlated being (ontological level), he derives his understanding of the Earth from the way he has access to it (epistemological level)” (Blok 2016, 457). In Blok’s reading, Meillassoux’s emphasis on the ancestrality of planet Earth can help us to fully realise that “the emergence of planet Earth is a prerequisite for the emergence of human being on the Earth and in this respect the origin of givenness of a world in which being and thinking are correlated” (Blok 2016, 459).

Calling for “a positive characterisation of the Earth itself” (Blok 2016, 457), Blok argues for an understanding of Earth as an uncorrelated condition of the world. He criticises Meillassoux’s “scientism” as simply presupposing an access to Earth and thus reducing uncorrelated being to correlated being (Blok 2017a, 398). Seeking to overcome the correlationist approach to Earth, Blok identifies “five principles of the materiality of Earth: Earth’s conativity, non-identity, responsiveness, performativity, and eventuality” (Blok 2020, 337). Drawing heavily on Spinoza’s metaphysics (Spinoza 1992), Blok depicts Earth’s conatus as the impulse in the undifferentiated materiality of Earth to differentiate and establish material entities as its modes (Blok 2020, 338). In this process, Earth remains asymmetrical and non-identical: Earth as non-identity is the origin of the identities of beings (Blok 2020, 341). At the same time, beings are constituted by their mutual responsiveness (Blok 2020, 342). Blok renders his concept more concrete by using James Gibson’s affordance ontology (Gibson 1979) to open an ecological perspective on Earth’s responsive conativity (Blok 2020, 343). Moreover, he argues that we should not conceptualise Earth as a being but rather as performing behaviour (Blok 2020, 345). Earth’s eventuality then consists in its inherent instability and volatility (Blok 2020, 353), which shows, besides other things, “the futility and megalomania behind the idea that we humans play a significant role” in Earth’s history (Blok 2020, 351).

3 Earthlings and Biomimetic Technology

Like Heidegger’s concept of “sense of Being” as “something beyond thinking which is unreachable for understanding” Blok 2014a, 222), Blok conceptualises Earth, or “nature” in his earlier papers (cf. Blok 2014a, 231), as the origin that “is without our understanding and responsiveness, i.e., is our understanding refused” (Blok 2014a, 232). Accordingly, Blok talks a great deal about Earth, and the “terrestrial turn”, and seeks to develop a positive concept of Earth, but only to emphasise that we humans must not imagine that we “play a significant role” in Earth’s history. This conclusion implies that we cannot meaningfully take care of Earth because it remains outside the scope of our human capacities. Hence, despite claiming that nothing else matters (Blok 2020, 337), Blok does not urge us to take care of Earth, let alone save it.

Instead, he suggests that it is Earth that may (possibly) have power to save. Accepting Heidegger’s identification of our age as that of enframing (cf. Heidegger 1977), he (and Zwier) not only interprets current calls for “planetary management” as part of this ontological framework (Zwier & Blok 2017, 225–229) but also claims that Heidegger’s thought concerning the saving power must be reoriented to become Earthbound (Zwier & Blok 2017, 238). “It neither suffices to equate the anthropos with Earth as geoforce and planetary manager, nor to completely unearth it as the ‘shepherd of Being’” (Zwier & Blok 2017, 238). In other words, we must overcome both the “anthropocenic” idea according to which technologized humankind should manage our planet and Heidegger’s idea of the human as primarily related to Being. Reinterpreting Heidegger’s reflections on enframing and its saving power, Blok (and Zwier) conceives of Earth itself as a saving power. In the Anthropocene, we are turned to Earth as it opens the possibility of the disclosure of another world, or, as Zwier and Blok put it, “the ontic-ontological Earth can be observed to withhold the possibility of a wholly different eco-logy and human identity” (Zwier & Blok 2017, 237). This idea is modelled on Heidegger’s concept of the history of being, i.e., that through its history, being is disclosed, or rather discloses itself, in different ways. Blok’s concept is unique in that it posits that Earth is what provides these different possibilities.

Earth’s non-identity and eventuality implies human powerlessness in (and on) the face of Earth, but other characterisations of Earth do allow for a (limited) human earthbound action. Blok develops this idea in his ecocentric concept of biomimetic technologies. He refers to Janine Benyus, who defines biomimetics as “a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems” (Benyus 2002, 1). Accordingly, instead of ruminating on how to manage Earth’s life-support systems, we should develop a concept of technology based on the concept of the responsive conativity of nature. Blok rejects the idea that biomimicry improves upon nature in favour of a co-operative, or symbiotic, concept: our technologies should not enslave nature but rather draw inspiration from its own design principles. As previously established, Blok promotes Spinoza’s concept of nature and calls for a “conato-mimesis” (Blok 2017b, 138). Developing our technologies in a biomimetic way, we must acknowledge “the independence and agency of natural-technological hybrids, their uncertainty and unpredictability”, for “the lack of (human) control is the price we have to pay for the ecocentric orientation of biomimetic technologies in the Anthropocene” Blok 2017b, 139).

4 Practical Issues: What to Do?

Having explained the essentials of Blok’s terrestrial turn, we are now in a position to advance to its critical evaluation. I will proceed in two steps. In this preparatory section, I focus on the practical consequences of Blok’s concept. Specifically, I ask the following question: Does Blok’s concept outline an effective way of dealing with climate change? In the next section, I will scrutinize the theoretical basis of his attitude: Is his description of Earth convincing?

Blok identifies the inability to address climate change as the main blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology. His description of our “being-in-the-Anthropocene” then makes it clear that we should turn to Earth. But, as explicated above, this turn is not supposed to help it. Instead of imagining ourselves as managers of Earth, we must acknowledge both the incomprehensibility and volatility of Earth. As Blok formulates it regarding his concept of biomimetic technologies, we must accept our lack of control. Undoubtedly, we cannot conceive of humans as non-earthly beings able to manage Earth from some transcendent(al) point (of view). However, Blok’s conception discourages us from acting where we could and should intervene. One can fully agree “that it is precisely anthropocentric humanism that has led to the exploitation of planet Earth in the industrial age” (Blok 2021, 31) but still insist that we must right the wrongs, i.e., remedy “the damage we have caused” (Blok 2021, 31). To accept this responsibility does not imply that we are trying to become managers of Earth, nor do we necessarily have to “equate the anthropos with Earth as geoforce” (Zwier & Blok 2017, 238) either. We just have to acknowledge that humans, with their technologies, have a destructive impact on Earth, and we must take responsibility for that. Acknowledging that our technologies have a global impact, we seem to have no other choice but to search for globally effective ways of taking care of the planet.Footnote 3

In this context, I see a second problem with Blok’s approach: we do not have to jettison all human control while acknowledging that we lack full control over the technologies we invent and put in the world. Hence, Blok’s appraisal of biomimetic technologies in their earthly volatility is not entirely justified. If anything, when inventing and putting our technologies in (earthly) place, we must be (pre)cautious and seek to anticipate their possible (side)effects. To be clear: I do not call for pointless and effectively self-destructive effort to fully control what is happening in the world. My point is rather that we must not “offload” our responsibility to entities we create – even when our creation is conceptualized as co-creation.

Blok himself raises a key question: what “exactly is the role of human agency in general, and of human technology in particular”, in the Anthropocene (Blok 2017b, 131). Indeed: (1) what are we humans doing, and (2) what should we be doing, in an era when our technologies have a decisive impact on Earth? Blok’s answer to the first question remains framed by Heidegger’s late philosophy: contemporary human agency is fundamentally conditioned by enframing, which is also why Blok criticises the very idea of planetary management. As for the second question, he seems to replace Heidegger’s idea of humans as servants of being with the idea (to put it rather brutally) of their servitude to Earth. Or, to formulate it less provokingly: he identifies Earth as the inspiration for human action in the Anthropocene. In the sections below, I will identify the limits of this framework. First, I will analyse Blok’s notion of Earth. Second, I will examine his conceptualization of the world as founded by technologies.

5 Theoretical Issues: What is Earth?

Blok’s concept of Earth combines Heidegger’s earth-world duality with Spinoza’s ideas on nature and Gibson’s affordance theory. This combination certainly offers an intriguing concept of nature, but when using Spinoza to explain the materiality of Earth, Blok underestimates the fact that Spinoza did not have Earth in mind when developing his monistic ontology.

One of the consequences of identifying Spinoza’s “Deus sive Natura” with “Earth’s materiality” (Blok 2020, 338) is the idea that Earth (i.e., God or Nature, in Spinoza’s conception) is infinite. This idea, however, does not fit how we experience our planet today: it appears not as an inexhaustible source of innumerable things but rather as a limited being with its own specificities. One might object, of course, that different humans experience Earth differently. No doubt. But Blok’s call for the terrestrial turn, necessitated by climate change, is based on the experience just described: that Earth can no longer be taken for granted as inexhaustible and indestructible, as documented by the ecological crisis endangering planetary ecosystems. In other words, it is an inherent part of our current “being-in-the-world” that we experience Earth as more powerful and less finite than us but still finite and not all-powerful. Besides, whereas in Spinoza’s concept there can be nothing outside of nature, i.e., of the substance of everything, Earth is a part of the solar system and is unthinkable without this system both in its very identity and in what it offers to and secures for earthly beings. Hence, Earth is an essentially different “entity” to that described by Spinoza as “Deus sive Natura”.

In fact, the term “Earth” seems ambiguous in Blok’s analyses. One naturally presupposes that it denotes the planet we live on and understand using our epistemic methods. Yet by pointing to Earth’s “materiality”, Blok seems to have on his mind something else, something more elementary and fundamental. It is worth reiterating that he explicitly aims to overcome “the correlationist approach to Earth as the zone in which we live” (Blok 2020, 336). Is it not justifiable to fulfil this task by taking a cue from Heidegger’s and Spinoza’s speculations? As previously mentioned, such a method may offer a stimulating concept of nature: by reconceptualising Heidegger’s Earth through Spinoza’s monistic ontology, i.e., by identifying “five principles of the materiality of Earth”, Blok develops a conceptual framework for a philosophy of nature. Yet we should ask the following question: Is such a concept able to address the problem it was developed for by providing a solid theoretical basis for the concept of biomimetic technologies? Two major reasons furnish us with a negative answer to this question.

The first one relates to the fact that Blok speculative concept of nature does not include the findings of empirical (and technologically mediated) natural sciences. When promoting biomimetic technologies, Blok refers to Benyus’s definition of biomimetics. Benyus, however, does not develop a speculative ontological concept of nature but depicts biomimetics as a science studying nature’s models (Benyus 2002, 1). Whereas Blok’s concept of nature says what nature is, Benyus’s biomimetic approach does not know the truth of nature and does not aspire to identify it: it is satisfied with studying its models. There is an unresolved tension between these two methods, a speculative and an empirical one, and it remains unclear whether Blok would agree with Heidegger that ontology must override the findings of sciences (cf. Heidegger 1976). Supposing we disprove of such an attitude, Blok’s five principles of nature become open to (not only) scientific falsification.

The question of the empirical verifiability of Blok’s speculative concept brings me to the second reason. In the previous section, I questioned Blok’s idea of putting all our trust – when developing biomimetic technologies – in an entity or process as volatile as Earth. But maybe the “nature” our technologies should be inspired by is not so erratic as Blok suggests. Perhaps we can acknowledge, following Heidegger, that Earth in its materiality is volatile or “eventual”, but still claim that earthly life is different. In a nutshell: it is not only possible but arguably desirable to distinguish between nature (i.e., earthly materiality) and life. And our current earthly predicament draws our attention not to Earth in its materiality but to earthly life as an endangered ecosystem, the ecosystem of living beings who are meaningful and meaning-building creatures. To provide a sufficient theoretical basis for developing biomimetic technologies, we must put more emphasis on this dimension.

6 World First!

Having considered how Blok conceptualises Earth, let me proceed to the world. Blok does not think of it in physical or cosmological terms (i.e., as the physical universe or the cosmos). His understanding of it is explicitly phenomenological: the world is “the dimension of the meaningful environment in which I am always already intentionally involved” (Blok 2022b, 2). In fact, it is not just one dimension of our environment but “the way in which reality as a whole appears” (Blok 2022b, 2). The world is the all-encompassing framework of our living, and as such it is an ontological phenomenon. Now, we have seen that Blok does not acknowledge the possibility – or as I see it, the reality – of the significant impact of humans on Earth. Earth is too principal, or too meta-physical, to be affected by them. How about the world? Do human beings have a significant role in the history of the world?

In a critical response to Clive Hamilton (2017), Blok questions the world-making capacity of humankind, claiming that the Anthropocene world is not produced by humans but “grows up behind our backs in the literal sense of the word” (Blok 2022a, 4). This may sound odd, yet Blok does not deny the decisive impact of technology on the world, and merely questions the idea that technology should be understood from a purely human perspective, as produced and controlled by humans. Humans did not make the Anthropocene world, yet in our current techno-industrial world, due to the reign of enframing, “humanity appears as world-maker” (Blok 2022a, 5). Blok does not, however, embrace the Heideggerian idea of the essence of technology as non-technological, and seeks to demonstrate the world-making capacity of technologies themselves. I regard his effort to identify the ontic conditions, i.e., technologies, of ontological “processes” as one of the most valuable aspects of his enterprise. Specifically, he connects the world of the Anthropocene with the steam engine.

What he intends to demonstrate is that its invention gave rise not only to a socio-economic transformation of the world but also to an ontological one: “the transformation of the appearance of the being of … beings as a whole” (Blok 2022a, 7). According to Blok, the world became (being understood as) a converted converter in this new era. Surprisingly, however, Blok does not explain ontic artefacts as the causes of an ontological transformation (Blok 2022a, 9). In this context, he introduces a subtle distinction between founding and grounding: “the invention of the steam engine founds the appearance of the world as converted converter in which it is already grounded” (Blok 2022a, 9). Blok speaks of an “interplay” between grounding and founding and claims that the founding of the world “is only performatively constituted in the repetitive appropriation of its grounding in its dissemination and further development in the world” (Blok 2022a, 10). In other words, the world of the steam engine is not founded once for all (with the invention of the first steam engine) but must constantly be “reasserted” through its constitutive “embodiments”, primarily through more widely disseminated and improved steam engines.

But the world has ontological priority (Blok 2022a, 10). Consequently, despite Blok’s emphasis on the performative constitution of the world, he insists that the world itself delimits what can be achieved within it (Blok 2022a, 10). The problem is that this concept does not allow for the interplay between ontic founding and ontological grounding: as the ontic possibilities are delimited by the world (“what can be achieved … and what not”; Blok 2022a, 10), they cannot – in their reality – interact with it, but can only realise what is made possible by the world. For the very same reason it seems impossible to claim, in the framework of this concept, that “each and every technological invention has this emancipatory potential – we may even frame it as positive freedom – to move beyond its reinforcing and continuing the … world” (Blok 2022a, 17). To make this emancipatory potential possible, we must abandon the idea that the world delimits – or in Blok’s terminology “grounds” – the sphere of the ontically possible.

As should be clear from the aforesaid, Blok implies that no entity is possible without its world. Seeking to make this concept compatible with the possibility of a new-to-the-world, he claims that “the creation of the identity of a new-to-the-world innovation” is “the ontic principle of the deviation from the existing World and founding of and grounding in a new World on an ontological level” (Blok 2022b, 12–13). The ontic new-to-the-world is, paradoxically, the principle of its own “grounding in” the new world. But this concept does not clarify what it should clarify: how the new-to-the-world becomes possible, and realizable, in the current world. Blok does not pay attention to this problem. Drawing on Spinoza’s concept of conatus, he simply identifies the ontic principle of deviation as ontogenetically constituting the identity, for example, of the steam engine (Blok 2022b, 8–9). Moreover, as he conceptualises this process by taking the inorganic materiality as the point of departure, he effectively presents it as something natural. Yet, he points to the principle of “responsiveness” as well, thus indicating the role of humans in the process of creative innovation (Blok 2022b, 11–13). In the following section, I will focus on their contribution.

7 Understanding the Human-Technology-World Relation

To clarify the role of humans, Blok draws on Gibson’s affordance theory and conceives of human creativity as a deviative action in response to affordances. He denies that human creativity can be found at a cognitive level: it must be localized to action (Blok 2022c, 7). The new is realized through human action thanks to affordances that are neither subjective nor objective: cutting across the subject-object dichotomy, they are ontologically primary (Blok 2022c, 9). Through this concept, Blok sees to overcome both the technocentric and the humanocentric understanding of creative innovation: neither human subjects nor objective technologies ground an innovative change; the affordances themselves do. And humans must be responsive, or attentive, to new affordances (i.e., not to the currently dominant and familiar ones) emerging in human-technology relations (Blok 2022c, 12).

In this concept, human responsive creativity fully depends on the affordances while their source, or their constitution, remains in the dark. The affordances then have an analogical role as the world described above: they ground the process of innovation as they delimit new possibilities. But where do these possibilities/affordances come from? Since Blok explicitly embeds his concept of human creativity in his general concept of creation based on Spinoza’s conatus and speaks, for example, of “the eventual emergence of our new responsiveness to new affordances” (Blok 2022c, 16), one is tempted to conclude that the fundamental ground of creativity is Earth in its eventuality. In the last instance, it is Earth that allows for creative action through its affordances – supposing we humans experience, as Blok puts it, “a misfit or asymmetry in the actual responsiveness to the affordances in the environment” (Blok 2022c, 15), and deviate from our current responsivity.

The lack of clarity regarding the source of affordances points to a major methodological issue: Gibson’s affordance theory was intended to explain the (perceptual) relation between the animal and its environment, but Gibson did not focus on specifically human phenomena. Blok refers to John T. Sanders’s (1997) and his own paper (Blok 2014b) to justify this transposition from an ecological to a socio-technological context, but much more work would be needed to theoretically buttress this shift. Generally, whereas Gibson’s theory did not have to deal with specifically human contexts, Blok’s theory on human creativity in the human-technology relation cannot do without incorporating its social, political, and economical frameworks – these dimensions arguably have a significant impact on how the “affordances” in the “environment” appear. Or, to formulate it from Blok’s own ontological perspective: this affordance theory cannot avoid the question of how the world is “performing” its ontological power in the affordances. Blok’s concept may be able to explicate the ontological impact of ontic technologies, but it does not articulate the “framing” force of the world we live in, which is exactly the ontological force of the currently prevailing world.

In this context, I would like to add one last critical remark. Let us take seriously Blok’s own claim that human (responsive) creativity is irreducible to an epistemic process: it is realized through action and proceeds in a material world in response to material affordances. It is through this process that the ontological world becomes transformed. In a similar manner, we should not reduce the “working” of the world itself to a semantic process as Blok tends to do when distinguishing “the material-ontic and the semantic-ontological level of creation” (Blok 2022b, 15). The world is neither only a material nor only a semantic “entity”: its semantic or epistemic power (i.e., the power of the world as an ontological pattern of meaning) is inseparable from its materiality (i.e., from the world in its being materially “patterned” by railroads, factories, socioeconomic structures, etc., due to the invention of the steam engine, to refer to Blok’s own example). Hence, the world is not an immaterial process “enframing” humans and cannot be reduced to it: we need to think of the social, (geo)political, and even physical processes necessitated by ontic entities as constituting the “pattern of meaning” itself. This way, we can give a more concrete and perhaps different meaning to Blok’s general idea of the “performative constitution” of the world through its “repetitive appropriation” (Blok 2022a, 10).

8 Conclusion: Back to the Mundane World

I hope to have indicated that we should keep doing what Vincent Blok has strived to do, namely seek to clarify how particular technologies can change the world we live in – and not only one particular part or aspect of it – while duly appreciating our Earthliness. Nonetheless, my analysis has revealed several areas where Blok’s approach needs modification or further elaboration.

Blok identifies Earth, specifically its materiality, as the ontic-ontological principle of everything, and speculates on its five essential properties. This gives a peculiarly metaphysical twist to Heidegger’s deliberately anti-metaphysical Earth-world duality. As explained above, this speculation is questionable because it does not do justice to how we currently experience Earth and underestimates the impact of humans on it. Our experience indeed calls for a terrestrial turn and we undoubtedly need to conceptualize “the human as Earthling” (Zwier & Blok 2017, 238), but this conceptualisation must not overemphasize our impotence (compared to the almightiness of Earth). Instead, we should acknowledge both ours and Earth’s finitude and take inspiration from earthly life.

Blok’s concept of the world should be further developed to concretely clarify how the world gains and “performs” its ontological power. Without a more concrete explication of the fundamental process of “patterning”, it is difficult to assess the plausibility of Blok’s specific concept of the world of the steam engine as that of a converter: his expositions lack identification of the concrete processes of how this world became established and how it continues to condition (not only) human understanding. In other words, we must explain how the world as “the dimension of the meaningful environment in which I am always already intentionally involved” (Blok 2022b, 2), is created and sustained. The general idea of the “performative constitution” of the world through its “repetitive appropriation” (Blok 2022a, 10) does not sufficiently address this need. In other words, the concept of the world, or that of ontology itself, must not function as a mysterious entity independent of mundane processes. Instead of being disconnected from material, social, and political processes, it must be (re)connected to them, for the world not only determines these processes but is also sustained by them.Footnote 4