Third wave continental philosophy of technology - Part III
Chair(s): Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University), Vincent Blok (Wageningen University), Hub Zwart (Erasmus University), Yuk Hui (Erasmus University)
Since its first emergence in the late nineteenth century (starting with Marx, Ure, Reuleaux and Kapp and coming of age throughout the twentieth century via a wide variety of authors such as Dessauer, Spengler, Gehlen, Plessner, the Jünger brothers, Heidegger, Bense, Anders, Günther, Simondon, Ellul and Hottois), philosophy of technology has predominantly sought to think ‘Technology with a capital T’ in a more or less ‘metaphysical’ or ‘transcendentalist’ fashion or as part of a philosophical anthropology.
After its establishment as an academic discipline in its own right from the early 1970’s onwards, philosophy of technology divided itself roughly into two different approaches, the so-called ‘engineering’ approach on the one hand and the so-called ‘humanities’ or ‘hermeneutic’ approach on the other (Mitcham 1994).
Within this latter approach, the transcendentalist framework remained most influential until the early 1990’s, when American (Ihde) and Dutch philosophers of technology (Verbeek) initiated the so-called ‘empirical turn’, which basically criticized all macro-scale or high-altitude and more ontological theorizations of technology such as Heidegger’s Enframing and Ellul’s Technological Imperative as inadequate and obsolete and instead proposed an explicit move toward micro-scale and low-altitude, i.e., empirical analyses of specific technical artefacts in concrete use contexts (Achterhuis 2001).
From the 2010’s onwards, this empirical approach has been reproached for obfuscating the broader politico-economic and ontological ambiance. Particularly European philosophers of technology expressed renewed interest in the older continentalist approaches and argued for a rehabilitation of the transcendental or ontological (as well as systemic) question of technology (Zwier, Blok & Lemmens 2016, Zwart 2021), for instance in the sense of the technosphere as planetary technical system responsible for ushering in the Anthropocene or Technocene (Cera 2023), forcing philosophy of technology to think technology big again (Lemmens 2021) and calling not only for a ‘political turn’ (Romele 2021) but also for a ‘terrestrial turn’ in the philosophy of technology (Lemmens, Blok & Zwier 2017).
Under the influence of, among others, Stiegler’s approach to the question of technics (Stiegler 2001), Hui’s concepts of cosmotechnics and technodiversity (Hui 2016) and Blok’s concept of ‘world-constitutive technics’ (Blok 2023), we are currently witnessing the emergence of what may be called a ‘third wave’ in philosophy of technology which intends, in dialectical fashion, to surpass the opposition between transcendental and empirical, and instead engages in combining more fundamental approaches to technology and its transformative, disruptive and world-shaping power with analyses of its more concrete (symptomatic) manifestations.
This symposium aims to open a debate among authors exemplifying this third wave, with a view to the contemporary intimate technological revolution, specifically focusing on the themes technology and human identity, human nature, agency and autonomy, artificial intelligence, robots and social media, and the environment and sustainability.
Presentations of the Symposium
Philosophy of technology today: ethics without self
Amelie Berger-Soraruff
Maison Francaise d'Oxford
This paper argues that the shared enthusiasm for applied ethics in philosophy of technology has led scholars to develop a technicist account of ethics. This approach, I claim, can cause more harm than benefit for individuals, for the measures developed through this type of ethics often lack a solid account of the self and a sustained consideration of subjective experience. I will defend Stiegler’s work on the ethics of the self as potentially filling this ethical vacuum.
The continental and analytical traditions of philosophy of technology are typically said to hold opposite views. On one hand, ‘Humanities philosophy of technology’ accepts the primacy of the human over technologies and elaborates a discourse that is essentially anthropometric, while on the other hand, the neo-empirical branch aims to understand technology from the very point of view of technologies (Mitcham 1994).
Recently, a variety of thinkers have challenged this picture to propose a much more symbiotic relationship between the human and its technological environment (Latour; Ihde; Verbeek). It is because both continental and analytical traditions sense that technology not only shapes individual lives and social institutions (Kroes et al.2008) but also recasts and transforms the core foundations of human existence, that they equally fear the impact of technoscientific advancements on our ‘humanity’ and all the values, ideals, concepts, and goals we hold dear. For these reasons, the field of applied ethics, with its intention to propose effective solutions to urgent social problems, has become the main way, if not the only way, to do philosophy of technology.
This, I argue, has led to a paradox. That of failing to propose a coherent vision of selfhood and engage with the complexity of subjective experience, while deploying unprecedented efforts to ‘protect the human’. Meanwhile, our supposedly life-enhancing innovations, policies, and procedures keep failing or deceiving us (Rodgers and Bremner 2018; Andre Gorz 2001; Enzo Mari 2012), and some thinkers have come to regret how the technologization of ethics is flattening the complexity of human experience (Chun 2006; Harari 2018).
In this paper, I present Stiegler as a “philosopher of the self.” Indeed, he has shown that alienation, madness, violence and despair are the prices we pay when we neglect subjective life (2010; 2012; 2013). I argue that his former background in phenomenology, coupled with his engagement with Foucault’s ethics and his concern for cultural/existential meaning, are valuable for thinking of the human as a complex subject and not simply as a set of organs (which is often the option preferred by scholars) or the mere expression of its technological milieu. In fact, his work may succeed in articulating a broad account of technology, both theoretical and practical, without neglecting the necessity to reflect on who we are aside from technological beings. In this respect, Stiegler’s work is fit to address what I see as a shortcoming in the current study of technology that is reluctant to address the question of the subject, at the risk of proposing inadequate solutions and deepening the crisis we are already in.
Rationality after the ‘algorithmic turn’
Natalia Juchniewicz
University of Warsaw
The concept of rationality has been questioned and criticised in XXth-century philosophy because of its association with the figure of domination (Herrschaft). To possess reason is to break with myth and to dominate nature (both external and internal). At the same time, the development of rationality based on the principles of purposive-instrumental thinking leads to a purely economic and quantitative perspective on what technology is supposed to serve. Adorno and Horkheimer criticise the principle of rationality and the absolute faith in reason, pointing out the difficulty of freeing human thought from the myth that recurs on another, ideological-economic level.
Habermas, on the other hand, seeks to rehabilitate reason by pointing to its communicative dimension, which makes it possible to establish interpersonal bonds and mutual recognition, thus fulfilling the condition of respect for human dignity and non-instrumentalisation (in the spirit of Kant's categorical imperative and Hegel's philosophy of recognition). At the same time, Habermas perceives that in modernity takes place a colonisation of the lifeworld by the logic of systems and a disconnection of expert languages from the experience of 'ordinary people', creating a gap between theory and practice.
In my paper I want to raise the main question of what we mean by rationality today when the process of decision making (from everyday choices to political and economic strategies), action planning or problem solving is coupled with technology, including learning artificial intelligence. I call this set of phenomena the 'algorithmic turn', which at the same time reorganises our thinking about what it means to be a thinking and learning subject (in the sense of a discussion about whether artificial intelligence is the intelligence along the lines of or in the contrast to human intelligence).
The following questions emerge from the main one: Is rationality currently experiencing a renaissance by becoming digital and algorithmic – in other words, is there more rationality because we have tools that realise the ideal of instrumental reason, but also means of communication that allow the coordination of plans and strategies between people on a large scale – or do the phenomena of the algorithmisation of thought and action diminish the agency of the subject and the autonomy of human thinking? Is the notion of algorithmic rationality self-contradictory? Does it convey a sense similar to instrumental or communicative rationality, or is it an entirely new way of thinking about thinking?
I will try to answer these questions by pointing to the relationship between technology and thinking, memory, action and environment, as well as transindividuality and sensibility (based on the theories of Heidegger, Stiegler, Simondon and Hui), in order to show the positive potential of digital and algorithmic rationality as a concept. At the same time, I will draw attention to the important critical dimension of algorithmic rationality and its limitations in more socially-oriented philosophy (Han, MacIntyre).
For the Ontological Rehabilitation of the Techno-Aesthetic Feeling
Andrea Zoppis
University of Ferrara
Building on insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the late 1960s, this paper begins by rethinking the value and role of his phenomenological method concerning the question of technology. Although not explicitly recognised as a philosopher of technology, Merleau-Ponty’s approach proves to have great potential for describing and explaining the role of technology in human life, especially concerning its impact on the intercorporeal dimension of relations among humans, non-human entities, and the environment. Considering Merleau-Ponty’s programmatic announcement of an ‘ontological rehabilitation of the sensible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964), I will first show how the ‘sensible’ – particularly in light of the so-called ‘intimate technological revolution’ – becomes a crucial ground to interrogate to assess the actual impacts of technology on human existence.
I will next turn to Gilbert Simondon’s notion of techno-aesthetic feeling (Simondon 2012) to further develop this insight. This will allow me to understand the necessity for technology itself to undergo an ontological rehabilitation that embraces its sensible, affective and imaginative implications. In this respect, I will consider Simondon’s theory of the ‘genetic cycle of images’, as presented in Imagination and Invention (Simondon 2023), to highlight some fundamental implications concerning the mental images that underpin technological invention, especially according to what Simondon describes as their quasi-organismicity. This ontological reconsideration of technology’s sensible and imaginal matrix will highlight how deeply it penetrates the human experience.
In this regard, I will then consider Mikel Dufrenne’s philosophy to examine the aesthetic impacts (aisthesis) of technology on human sensibility and affectivity. In particular, I will consider the notion of quasi-subject (Dufrenne 1973) to account for a profound agentic power of technical objects undergoing their more explicit technical functionalities. Through their sensible and expressive configurations, these objects surreptitiously create a ‘neo-environment’ for human beings (Cera 2023), fundamentally shaping our experience. Human beings are, therefore, prey to a technological process of psycho-sociological alienation (Simondon 2017) or ‘anesthetization’ (Dewey 2005, Montani 2014), gradually becoming quasi-objects (Dufrenne 1966).
I will therefore argue that it is only through an ontological reconsideration of the sensible, affective and imaginative charge intrinsic to technical objects that it becomes possible to direct the ‘intimate technological revolution’ towards an emancipatory outcome. Following Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, and Dufrenne, this paper advocates for a philosophical technical culture that preserves the primordial contact with sensible intercorporeality and with the terrestrial environment to which technologies intrinsically belong.
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