The Philosophical Foundations of the Encyclical Laudato Si' of Pope Francis

In one’s search for the philosophical foundations of the encyclical Laudato Si’ by Pope Francis one may be surprised to find the indirect influence of thinkers like Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler on the encyclical through Romano Guardini (1885-1968). These philosophers were instrumental in fashion- ing the liberal thinking of Romano Guardini who in turn influenced the vision of Laudato Si’. Descartes told the intellectuals of Europe to stop fussing over theological matters and philosophical abstractions and to get about the business of “mastering” nature. This shift in consciousness gave rise to the modern sciences and their attendant technologies. It is the Guardinian worries about the disastrous consequences of this shift that is shared by Pope Francis in his encyclical. In his elucidations Pope Francis is heavily influenced by Romano Guardini’s End of the Modern World, which presents a sort of nightmarish vision of humanity, in which human power gives rise to a kind of technology which itself operates by its own logic of progress, liberating itself from human control in the process, and eventually returns to plague the inventor. Many readers of Guardini may not know that in these technological views Guardini was himself heavily indebted to Martin Heidegger’s critique of modernity’s technological view of thinking? The present essay makes an attempt to show that in the final analysis the foundational philosophical vision of Laudato Si is influenced by the critique of Martin Heidegger on the “machinational” interpretation of beings that subjugates hu mans and commodifies nature as well as Heidegger’s philosophical insights into the way of overcoming it