And these machines become in their forms less and less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.
Oswald Spengler, The decline of the West (1923: 503–504).
Abstract
In this article I respond to Yuk Hui by revisiting the crossroads in the philosophy of technology as represented by the philosophies of Stiegler and Ihde. Whereas Hui proposes the concept of cosmotechnics as an integrating perspective, I conceive of the crossroads in other terms, namely from the perspective of substantivism. I characterize our present situation, what a philosophy of technology should address and then examine Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics from this alternative perspective. My main concern is to show future paths of development for cosmotechnical thought.
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Incidentally, the phrase “technics as the subject of history” first appears as the title of a 1978 text by Günther Anders, included in the second volume of The Obsolescence of man (…).
Of course, substantivists do not present a united front and many people I call “substantivists” would reject this label. However, sometimes, if you seek conceptual clarification, you must begin by being general and vague.
This universality is also one of the premises for Stiegler’s denunciation of the proletarization of consciousness as planetary process, irrespective of culture.
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Vaccari, A. Cosmotechnical Thought Between Substantivism and the Empirical Turn. Found Sci 27, 1279–1284 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09754-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09754-1