Third wave continental philosophy of technology - Part IV
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
After cybernetics, after thinking
Yuk Hui
Erasmus University
Heidegger’s claim about the end of philosophy and its succession by cybernetics calls for a thinking whose relation to technology remains unclear. Is thinking—understood as oriented toward Being—a sufficient response to the current planetary condition? Specifically, is the thinking that originates from the Abendland capable of addressing the planetary nature of technology, which has already surpassed its control and produced a generalized Besinnungslosigkeit ? Stiegler transforms Heidegger’s notion of penser (to think) into panser (to care or to heal), broadening the thinking of Being into a therapeutic thinking by first exposing thinking to danger—namely, to the abyss of the Gestell (enframing). This generalization, however, necessitates a return to localities and a diversification that exceeds the task of pursuing what thinking is; instead, it calls for an individuation of thinking that is adequate to the planetary condition.
Evil incorporated. the tragic philosophy of technology of mehdi belhaj kacem
Pieter Lemmens
Radboud University
Since the 1990s, philosophy of technology has to a large extent been dominated by the so-called empirical turn, which basically consisted, negatively, of (1) a rejection of all ontological, metaphysical and even anthropological considerations of technology understood as ‘Technology with a capital T’ – exemplified by the so-called classical or transcendentalist philosophers of technology such as Marx (Capital), Heidegger (Enframing), Ellul (Technological Imperative) and Mumford (Megamachine) – and, positively, (2) an explicitly pragmatic dedication to analyzing concrete technical artefacts and their impact on the human-technology relation in specific use contexts. Adoption of this empirical stance was prevalent among others in postphenomenology (Ihde, Verbeek), science and technology studies (Bijker, Irwin, Pinch) and to a lesser extent also in the critical constructivism approach of Feenberg and his followers. All attempts at a more fundamental, i.e., profoundly philosophical theorization of the phenomenon of technology as such – in the sense introduced by Heidegger as a questioning into the essence of technology – was thus dismissed by mainstream philosophy of technology as overly abstract, reductionistic, wrongheaded or even downright inadequate.
Within continental philosophy more generally though, so-called ‘Technology with a capital T’ has come to be acknowledged over time more and more as the phenomenon that actually constitutes and conditions the very thing that has arguably always been the central topic of philosophy – from its very beginning in antiquity onwards – and that is to say the transcendence pervading and animating human existence, i.e., what Heidegger called being-in-the-world or Dasein: the onto-logical or metaphysical nature of human being. This is notably the case, albeit in very different ways, in the work of thinkers such as Günther, Hottois, Janicaud, Schürmann, Lacoue-Labarthe, Stiegler and Sloterdijk, and more recently also Yuk Hui – the latter arguing for a non-eurocentric reprisal of the question concerning technology sensu Heidegger based on a recognition of the existence of a plurality of culture-specific cosmo-technae and a fundamental technodiversity.
Another ‘transcendentalist’ or ‘metaphysical’ approach to technology, profoundly original and presented as part of an all-encompassing ontological framework called the system of pleonectics, has been developed in more recent times by the French-Tunesian philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (1973). This system understands the phenomenon of beingness in its relation to Being (i.e., the ontological difference) in neo-Anaximandrian terms as a dialectic of appropriation and expropriation and conceives of human being as a process of techno-mimetic, and as such monstrous, appropriation-expropriation. The decisive conceptual move made by Kacem is to demonstrate the originally transgressive or archi-transgressive nature of human transcendence as rooted in techne-mimesis as a violent appropriation and confiscation of the laws of physis. As such, he rehabilitates in a secular fashion the original connection traditionally pronounced by religion but totally denied in contemporary philosophy of technology between technology (or science) and evil.
In my paper I will present Kacem’s innovative ‘transcendentalist’ understanding of technology, expounding its remarkable resonances with the views of both Stiegler and Sloterdijk, and arguing for its profound relevance for our current diabolic era of planetary catastrophe, massive oligarchic corruption and deception, emerging global technocracy and intense cognitive and psychological warfare in the context of escalating geopolitical conflict.
Towards an Evolutionary Turn in the Philosophy of Technology
Marco Pavani
University of Turin
This paper aims to contribute to scholarship in the philosophy of technology by advocating for an “evolutionary turn” in this field of study. I aim to show that the contemporary philosophy of technology should pay more attention to the evolutionary dimension of the human relation to technology, also and most importantly in a biological and even genetic sense (Blad, 2010; Moore, 2017). This perspectival shift does not seek to replace the currently well-established empirical turn (Achterhuis, 2001), but rather to broaden and enrich its scope by highlighting what—in my view—are hitherto neglected aspects of our relation to technology.
First, I will argue that considering the evolutionary dimension of our relation to technology may help us better articulate the relationship between philosophical and scientific practices. I will submit that adopting this evolutionary perspective requires philosophical analyses to be scientifically up-to-date and consistent and suggest the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (Laland et al., 2015) as the reference scientific paradigm for this research. I will also claim that an evolutionarily oriented philosophy of technology may enable us to consider scientific findings more critically by emphasizing the role played by technologies not only in our evolution but also in the study of this evolution carried out by evolutionary anthropology (Sloterdijk, 2016).
Second, I will underscore how an evolutionary turn in the philosophy of technology does not exclusively concern the study of our prehistoric past but also contributes to the understanding of the current epoch. I will point out that appreciating how our relation to technology influences our biology even today may bear major relevance to ongoing debates about the legitimacy of technological interventions over the human lifeform (e.g., Morris, 2006). I will also argue that investigating the evolutionary origin of our relation to technology, insofar as it consists in a narrative reconstructing how we became who we are, performatively influences our self-representation (Latour & Strum, 1986), holding sway over current biopolitical paradigms.
Third, I will outline how this approach may also enable us to reframe the question of the human relation to technology from a conceptual viewpoint. I will highlight the limitations of the “human-technology relations” approach exemplified by postphenomenology (e.g., Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2005) and submit that we should not talk about relations between humans and technologies but rather about relations between technologies and biological organs in order to fully appreciate how the human lifeform is actually constituted by technology, in an essential rather than merely extrinsic and accidental way.
I will therefore interpret Stiegler’s (e.g., 2014) idea of a “general organology” as a methodological apparatus suitable for reframing the question of “the human” from an evolutionary perspective, conceiving of it as the impermanent outcome of the negotiation between biological organs, technologies and social organizations, on the one hand, and the reconstruction of this relation, itself exerted as this threefold relation, on the other hand. The resulting insights, I believe, might help us better understand the phenomenon of technology and provide us with improved conceptual tools to analyse it.
Can we read Stiegler environmentally
Martin Ritter
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Although one of the most tangible effects of technology is its impact on the natural environment, philosophers of technology pay most attention to its other effects, such as on human perception or agency, and the like. Some work has been done at the intersection of philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy, for example by the proponents of the so-called terrestrial turn in philosophy of technology, but arguably more research is needed. Let me put it thus: we need to focus not only on the human-technology-world relationship but also on the human-technology-environment relationship.
Perhaps surprisingly, I suggest reading Bernard Stiegler as a thinker on whom we can build to accomplish this task. Stiegler recognizes the essential dependence of humans, in their very humanity, on their environment. For Stiegler, however, the environment we must consider in the first place is not natural but artificial: technology is not just something we create but an element, or milieu, founding the very existence of humans and their world. Technology, however, creates not only a medium of human existence but also, directly or indirectly, a new environment for other inhabitants of the Earth as well. Because of this double effect, Stiegler’s philosophy of technology implies, or at least demands, environmental philosophy as a philosophy of the environment.
The first aim of my presentation is to reconstruct Stiegler’s ideas about how human technological mediation contributes to environmental degradation. Stiegler captures this through his conception of the so-called general organology, which describes the transformation of life by means other than biological, namely by technology. More specifically, he uses the entropy-negentropy duality to capture this process. Stiegler emphasizes the anti-entropic potency of life and especially of human life, but he leaves behind anthropocentric prejudices precisely because he does not conceptualize human life as exceptional in its autonomy but rather as dependent on technology. However, in his (justified) focus on the noetic character of humans and their entropization, he tends to undervalue, or at least pay insufficient attention to, the entanglement of the human as noetic process with non-noetic processes, be they material or biological, outside of human psycho-somatic bodies.
The second aim of my talk is to focus on, and re-evaluate, this “environment” of human life. This complex task involves thinking about technology, which is a human milieu, not (only) in terms of its difference from the natural environment, but rather in terms of its dependence on it and interconnectedness, even symbiosis with it. Technological artifacts (and human beings) do not emerge ex nihilo but use, even exploit, and transform what is “given” by nature. Doing justice to this technology-environment relationship challenges Stiegler’s somewhat one-sided emphasis on the technology-human relationship in its potentially negentropic effect and probably requires the development of more nuanced concepts to capture the environmental issues associated with technology as a medium that affects not only human life.
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