Philipp Pattberg

Across civilizations and centuries, balance with the natural world was more than a metaphor, it was a way of knowing, a way of being.

In Taoism, the dance of yin and yang expresses the interdependence of opposites: light and dark, action and stillness, life and decay. Harmony arises not from dominance, but from reciprocity.

In Buddhism, the principle of balance is woven into the very fabric of the path to liberation. The Middle Way, neither indulgence nor denial, emphasizes moderation and harmony within oneself and with the world. Importantly, Buddhist cosmology does not separate humans from nature; all beings are seen as arising through dependent origination, meaning everything exists only in relation to everything else. There is no isolated self, no isolated species, only interconnection. Suffering arises when we resist this reality, when we cling, extract, or separate.

In Stoic philosophy, living in accordance with nature was the foundation of virtue and peace. And the ancient Greeks spoke of kosmos, not simply as the universe, but as an ordered, elegant whole, where human flourishing meant aligning oneself with the harmony of the whole.

And across Indigenous traditions worldwide, nature was never “other.” It was kin, alive with agency, and deserving of respect. These worldviews were rooted in a common principle: that humans are part of a larger whole, and that our survival depends on maintaining the delicate balance within it. When going into the forest, we would breath deep and meet our brothers and sisters, the trees, who are part of our breath.

For most of human history, balance wasn’t optional. It was the definition of wisdom.

But then came a rupture.

Around the time of the European Enlightenment, we began to see the world differently. Not as a partner in dialogue, but as an object of study and control.

Think of Francis Bacon, who famously envisioned science as a means to “bind nature to our service.” Nature was no longer a living presence but a machine, predictable, disassembled, to be optimized. The philosophical shift was subtle, but profound. We no longer asked how to live with nature; we asked how to master it.

This ushered in a new kind of asymmetry. We built systems that take more than they give, and knowledge frameworks that prized abstraction over embeddedness. What was once a feedback loop became a one-way extraction. What was once a conversation became a monologue.

Today, imbalance is not just environmental. It is psychological, social, and spiritual.

Climate disruption. Species extinction. Soil depletion. Plastic pollution in our bloodstream. These are symptoms, yes, but they are also signals: signs that something deeper has been lost in our orientation toward the world.

The term Anthropocene doesn’t just mark a geological epoch. It marks a philosophical moment, a time when one species disrupts the balance of the whole. We have collectively managed to cross 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries. We live, increasingly, inside metaphors of limitless growth, linear progress, expansion, and unilateral control. But nature doesn’t follow linear scripts. It cycles, it oscillates, it corrects. And we have forgotten how to listen to Mother Nature.

Imbalance is no longer an anomaly. It has become our operating system.

So the question I pose is this: Can we relearn symmetry? Not as nostalgia, but as an act of courage?

We don’t need to abandon science or modernity. But we do need to recover the parts we left behind, those ancient intuitions of humility, interdependence, and restraint. We need a new synthesis of knowledge and wisdom, of progress and perspective. We need a new Middle Way.

Perhaps balance is not a state to be achieved, but a relationship to be restored. And perhaps that restoration must begin not in policy or technology alone, but in how we think, in the philosophical ground from which our actions grow. To restore balance with nature, we must first repair the rupture in our understanding. And in doing so, we may find that the very idea of balance, once discarded, is the very foundation of everything.