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The full title reads ‘Homo sapiens technologicus: Philosophie de la technologie contemporaine, philosophie de la sagesse contemporaine,’ which may be translated as ‘Homo sapiens technologicus : Philosophy of contemporary technology, philosophy of contemporary wisdom.’
In Goeminne (2011), I also draw on the notion of ‘forms of life’ to suggest a ‘politics of the imaginable’ that takes socio-material practices as primary matters of a concern for sustainability.
All quotes from Puech 2008 used in this symposium have been translated into English by the respective authors in consultation with Michel Puech.
Paragraph 3.2 « Désuétude de la politique ».
A tradition which is becoming increasingly Anglophone rather than Anglo-Saxon, with important contemporary philosophers of technology in the Dutch and Scandinavian contexts.
Peter-Paul Verbeek’s (2011) work is very relevant in this sense.
Puech makes reference to the economist Thomas Schelling’s (1978) theory of micromotives and macrobehaviors in which individual actions are performed with a consciousness of acting within an implicit collective.
It must be noted that I employ the term « solution » here in a relatively general, mainly pragmatist–philosophical sense. For an interesting interpretation and critique of its possible ideological uses and underpinnings, cf. Morozov 2013.
I use masculine personal pronouns in respect of HST because there is no mention of gender whatsoever in Homo sapiens technologicus, which is indicative of both the masculine character of the liberal autonomous subject and the philosophy of technology (see, for example, Puech’s [2008, 332] discussion of ‘le grand homme’).
This raises the tricky epistemological dilemma of the extra-discursive location of the philosopher and, despite Puech’s painstaking analysis of his subjective world, it is often reiterated in an objectivist register. Indeed, somewhat like the Foucauldian archaeologist of knowledge, who came across as a detached meta-phenomenologist, Puech often seems to ‘perform an “ego split” in order to look on as a detached spectator’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 87) at those of us who are embedded with their artefacts in the hic et nunc, and for whom reflection and ethical action are difficult burdens to shoulder.
Puech resembles Charles Taylor (1989, 285-294; 1994) here, for whom the value of an ethic of authenticity derives from the fact that it is an individualized identity that is personally constituted in respect of a community’s moral ontology (of course, for Puech, authenticity is articulated through an ontology that is constituted by our coexistence with the artefact).
Likewise, Puech also makes excessive use of the rhetorical technique of chiasmus (where he reiterates his point by interrelating clauses on the basis of a reversal of their structure), which at times seems to serve as a substitute for argument.
Puech (2008, 336; 439, f. 350) mentions Foucault’s work on techniques of the self, in which the telos in Graeco–Roman antiquity is the care of oneself (or, in Greek antiquity, mastery of oneself), yet there is arguably a misappropriation of Foucault’s idea. Techniques of the self are those of a subject embedded—as Foucault learnt from Heidegger—in a field of relations of force, excess, combat, and power (as Foucault learnt from Nietzsche), which is why Foucault speaks of modes of subjectivation (in fields that compel us to be subjects) and suggested that at ‘the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom’ (Foucault 1984, 222). For a fuller discussion, see Dalgliesh (2013, ch. 6).
As Jean-Luc Nancy (1993, 10) has shown, man’s Achilles heel is his monological process of identity formation that simultaneously opposes, assimilates, and constitutes difference, and ‘this property designates or denotes itself as “man”.’ Consequently, man is the subject of criticism from feminist and postcolonial writers insofar as he must make difference at the expense of others, while the process of self-identification itself presumes transparency, transcendental values, and the constancy of reason, which postfoundationalist, cultural studies, and poststructuralist authors strongly question.
Puech (2008, 304; 331-333; 366–367) aligns himself in spirit and theory with the American tradition of civil disobedience. However, there is always a risk of ‘misunderstandings that result from the effect of allodoxia (misrecognition) produced by the distance (and not only geographical) that separates national intellectual fields’ (Bourdieu 1997: 451). Perhaps a more nuanced reading of the civil disobedience tradition would unpack its very American roots of the need for self reliance given the initial absence of state structures, but which today translates into a neoliberal politics of radical individualism founded on a neoconservative vision of the social world or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to pretend, the very absence of any society.
Apart from a classic conception of power as an independent, macro-variable that is static, hierarchical, and exercised by mechanisms of repression from the top-down, power as a capacity can also work from the bottom-up when individuals withdraw their consent (Puech 2008, 327).
I play on the argument in defense of formal rights by Keith Joseph (Sumpton and Joseph 1979), who famously said poverty is not unfreedom, since, although, I may not be able to afford to dine at The Peninsula Hotel, I cannot be said to lack the freedom to do so. For a fuller discussion, see Taylor (1995) and Raymond Plant (1998).
Swierstra 1997, Luppicini 2008, Verbeek 2011.
About ownership rates for computers and all Internet-enabled devices, see http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/material/ICTFactsFigures2013.pdf, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage. Africa lags behind, but mobile and shared access to the Web seem to be rapidly growing.
Von Hippel 2005, Weinberger 2007, and Zittrain 2009 with his fascinating notion of ‘generativity.’
I used masculine pronouns in the book because the feminine rule would have appeared strongly ideological (and so counterproductive) to French readers in 2008.
Kant’s position is stated in his 1784 Idee (Kant 1784).
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Goeminne, G., Sharon, T., Van Den Eede, Y. et al. Book Symposium on Homo sapiens Technologicus: Philosophie de la Technologie Contemporaine, Philosophie de la Sagesse Contemporaine. Philos. Technol. 27, 581–608 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0127-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0127-6