Philosophy of technology in the age of the anthropocene. Theorizing and imagining the emerging geo-techno-logical condition
‘Das ist keine Erde mehr, auf den der Mensch heute lebt’ (Heidegger, Spiegel interview, p. 98).
Pieter Lemmens, PhD
Radboud University Nijmegen
Department of Philosophy and Science Studies
1. Introduction. The current climate and energy crises
In this paper I want to examine briefly, and still very exploratively, what kind of conseqences the anthropocene, the new geological epoch we’re supposedly inhabiting for some time now according to some prominent geologists and earth system scientists, should have, for our thinking of technology and in particular our thinking of the human-technology relationship in general. Both are very basic questions of any philosophy of technology of course and so my aim here is to explore to some degree how I think philosophy of technology should integrate the anthropocene or the ‘anthropocenic event’ and all that it possibly implies in its thinking about technology, technological innovation, the relation between the human and technology and that between technology and nature.
The anthropocene, the geological epoch in which the human has become the most important geological (f)actor, first of all marks the entrance of humanity into a phase in its history which will be characterized by huge changes in the earth's biosphere, i.e., in the global ecological system that has up until now silently and robustly supported its cultural-historical projects (Greer 2008, Martenson 2011). The two most important and well-known of these changes are global warming and the dwindling of fossil fuel resources, the depletion of oil as the principal source of energy driving our hyper-industrial and permanent innovation-oriented societies being of primary concern (Kunstler 2005, Heinberg 2005).
As Langdon Winner has pointed out in his keynote lecture at the SPT 2013 conference in Lisbon on the future of philosophy of technology, most representatives of this discipline do not seem to show much concern or even attention for the fact that these changes imply that two of the most general conditions that they, like most inhabitants of our advanced industrial societies, take
for granted in their thinking about technology and its future might soon very well become a thing of the past, namely: a steady supply of cheap oil and the existence of a stable climate favorable to human life. Both the fact that the conventional, easy to drill and extract oil reserves are running out everywhere as well as the undeniable and irreversible fact of global warming due mostly to the massive burning up of those oil reserves, will undoubtedly have drastic consequences for our heavily oil-dependent if not oil-addicted industrial high-tech and hyper-consumerist societies, yet as Winner observed quite convincingly in his talk, ‘the basic perspective of most philosophers of technology remains that of business as usual, the expectation that our way of life will continue to chug along basically unchanged from patterns of the past century’ (Winner 2013). Many of them seem to assume at least implicitly that economic growth as we’ve known it for two centuries now will continue forever and will allow for an ever more extravagant and mindblowing technological progress. This assumption is most possibly wrong, however. As many climate experts and many authors within the peak-oil community suggest, it is much more likely that humanity is destined to face the end of what John-Michael Greer has called ‘the myth of progress’ and should prepare instead for a future of prolonged economic and technological ‘contraction’, as James Howard Kunstler names it (Kunster 2005), that is to say a sustained period of ‘catabolic collapse’, in the words of Greer, inevitably unfolding itself as a process of ‘deindustrialization’ (Greer 2008, 2009).
However that may be, what is clear, as the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler points out, is that the anthropocene reveals the toxic and entropic character of the process of capitalist (hyper)industrialization and that the big challenge it imposes on us as an increasingly globalized humanity is how to deal with it both technologically, politically and culturally (Stiegler 2014). In this short talk, my ambition is no more than briefly explore some of the repercussions that the ‘anthropocenic event’ might have for our thinking about technology, for this occasion starting from the assessment of this event in the recent work of Bernard Stiegler.
After briefly reviewing Stiegler’s take on the anthropocene, I will draw some general conclusions from it, which I will then confront with one of the most influential and although abundantly criticized still very profound and pertinent philosophical analysis of technology, that of Martin Heidegger, and I will do so explicitly from the perspective of the anthropocene as interpreted by Stiegler. I will thereby focus on Heidegger’s famous notion of the danger of technology and attempt a Stieglerian inspired ‘anthropocenic’ re-interpreation of it that should,
hopefully, give a renewed, more up-to-date and less esoteric significance to this rather difficult notion. I will conclude with some thoughts and suggestions for what I consider to be the imperative that comes to us with the realization of our anthropocenic condition, not from a Heideggerian Being with a capital ‘B’ maybe but from something like it, and that is the need for a global anthropotechnological enlightenment.
5. Anthropogenesis and the anthropocene as a disclosive event
Most significantly, I want to propose here that we should think the anthropocene from the perspective of the process of anthropogenesis as a process of technogenesis and perceive it in this respect as the call for an anthropotechnological (or anthropotechnogenetic) turn, a Kehre in some Heideggerian kind of way but not quite as he intended it himself.
For Stiegler, very briefly, anthropogenesis is a technogenic process in that it proceeds from a process of technical exteriorization, i.e., the production of technical artefacts or technical organs, and subsequent interiorization, i.e., the learning of skills and practices by the psychic and somatic organs and the collective organizations based on these technical organs. This process gives rise to ever more complex and expanding technical milieus consisting of continuoulsy evolving organological configurations mae up of three organ systems that are transductively related, the latter term meaning that these organ systems are what they are only from within their interrelationships: (1) the psychosomatic organs, (2) the technical organs and (3) the social organizations.
Now the anthropocene, in that it unmistakably reveals the systemic and massively toxic, destructive and entropic character of contemporary, hyperindustial organological configurations, signals the necessity of a turn in this process (Stiegler 2014). As such, the anthropocene must be perceived as a disclosive event. It reveals, on the one had, the utter dependence of the anthropos on the earthly life support system and, on the other hand, it reveals the decisive impact of the anthropos itself on this system. By doing so and most importantly, put in Stieglerian terms, the anthropocene discloses humanity’s organological condition as such and it does so by putting the anthropos, that is say ‘us’ human beings, into question as never before.
What is more, with the advent of the thermodynamic machine that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution, first of all the steam engine as it was invented by James Watt in 1776, it has become clear for physics that the principle of entropy is determinative of nature, that is to say
of inorganic physis. In the twentieth century then, with Erwin Schrödinger, organic nature, life, is reconceived in terms of negentropy (Schrödinger 1944). What distinguishes the human lifeform as a technical lifeform from all other forms of life, however, and this is something that was not theorized by Schrödinger obviously, is that it has thoroughly implicated technology in its struggle for survival, adding a dimension of freedom and openness to it such that its form of life cannot be conceived anymore only in terms of survival. Therefore, anthropic vital negentropy can only be understood adequately by taking technology into account. And this complicates things because, given the fact that technology can be both a force of negentropy and of entropy (and herein lies its ambiguity which Stiegler theorizes in terms of a pharmacology, meaning that technology is both poisonous and healing to human existence), the human lifeform as a technical life form is qualitate qua both entropic and negentropic.
6. Bernard Stiegler: from the anthropocene to the neganthropocene
Since it unveils the massively and systemically entropic character of the current organological configuration, the anthropocene is interpreted by Stiegler as the entropocene, i.e., as the epoch of entropic (hyper)industrialization, characterized by an entropy that affects all three organ systems and that ultimately destroys their planetary ecological and geological conditions as well. In short one could say that this hyper-entropic nature of contemporary, hypercapitalist organological configurations manifests itself among other things in generalized consumerism, in generalized calculation and digital automation and in proletarianization and nihilism (or the ‘devaluation of all values’ in Nietzschean terms) concretizing itself as the collapse of libidinal economies and the reign of drives over desires. What the anthropocene calls for, according to Stiegler, is an exit from it or an ‘overcoming’ of it, through the invention of a new, negentropic, curative and ecointelligent organological configuration and thereby to transform it into the neganthropocene. For Stiegler, this neganthropotechnological turn is a pharmacological turn: a transformation of the global technical milieu, principally digital nowadays, from a poisonous and entropic milieu into a remedial (or curative) and (thereby) negentropic milieu (Stiegler 2014).
As already indicated earlier, for the human lifeform as a constitutively technical lifeform, technology can aid negentropy but also accelerate entropy, and it does so organologically and pharmacologically. As a technical form of life, human or anthropic life is characterized by two dimensions that are absent in all other forms of life: (1) the noetic or the domain of knowledge
and knowing, and (2) the ‘erotic’ or libidinal as the domain of desires and projections. Both these domains are technically constituted and conditioned and this means that the play of entropy and negentropy in these domains is ‘mediated’ by technology as well. At the noetic level, one could say that negentropy means intelligence and the proliferation of skills, knowledges and ideas while at the ‘erotic’ or libidinal level, negentropy means ‘sublimation’ as the formation of desires and with it the projection of individual and collective goals and ideals through the binding of the drives. Today, it is foremost the digital pharmakon (as the contemporary technical milieu of the mind) that more and more conditions both the noetic and the ‘erotic’ life of the anthropos
Technologies as pharmaka can both support and enhance the noetic and ‘erotic’ as well as undermine and deteriorate it. This means, in Stieglerian terminology, that they can be both toxic and curative, their toxicity leading to noetic and ‘erotic’ entropy or proletarianization as a loss of knowledge, know-how and intelligence and as the destruction of libidinal energies and with it the libidinal economies of goals and ideals, their curative potential providing the possibility of noetic and ‘erotic’ negentropy through deproletarianization as the creation of new knowledges, knowhow and intelligence and the (re)-constitution of a libidinal economy.
In general, anthropic entropy can be conceptualized in terms of proletarianization. Now, according to Stiegler, in the anthropocene we find ourselves in a pharmacological situation of generalized proletarianization or toxification, today heavily amplified through a generalization of digital automation, yet as pharmakon, the digital also embodies the promise of an exit, in the sense of a neganthropic turn. But before elaborating on this, I want to turn briefly to Heidegger, whose famous meditations on technology also talk about a turn in or of technology and in fact center upon and culmimate in an attempt to think this turn [Kehre].
7. The anthropocene and Heidegger. On the danger of technology and the earth
One could argue that, in Heideggerian terms, the anthropocene can be perceived as resulting fom the reign of modern technology as ‘machination’ [Machenschaft] and as the domination and exploitation of nature as a standing reserve [Bestand] in blind obeyance to the challenging claim [Anspruch] of enframing [Gestell], issuing from the metaphysical destiny [Geschick] of being (Heidegger 1977).
On the one hand, there seems to be no notion in Heidegger of the ‘limits to growth’ as following from the finitude of the Earth and that of its material and energetic resources and thus
no sense of the earthly ecosystem as a limiting factor in the project of enframing. On the other hand, however, Heidegger speaks in some texts, for instance in his well-known meditations on ‘The overcoming of metaphysics’ from 1936-38, about enframing as involving the destruction [Verwüstung] of our planet, to which he attributes what he calls the ‘unimpressive law of the Earth’ [das unscheinbare Gesetz der Erde]. This hidden law, according to Heidegger, assigns to every being and domain of beings its ‘accrued circle of the possible’ [gewachsenen Kreis des Möglichen] (Heidegger 1992). Obeying this law, human existence would be a ‘quiet dwelling between heaven and earth’ [ruhiges Wohnen zwischen Erde und Himmel], as he writes in the essay Releasement [Gelassenheit].
Technical enframing, on the other hand, slashes the Earth into a ‘tiring’ [Abmüdung], a ‘using up’ [Vernutzung] and an ‘artificialization’ [Veränderung des Künstlichen] which ultimately destroys it. As such, enframing forces the earth above its ‘accrued circle of the possible towards that which is not possible anymore and is therefore the impossible’ (ibid.).
Enframing has enforced the impossible upon the earthly possible, yet nothing guarantees, says Heidegger, that technical achievements can make the impossible possible. For Heidegger, instead of just using/consuming [Vernutzen] the Earth and imposing upon it the impossible, we should instead learn to receive her ‘blessing’ [Segen] and watch [wache] for the ‘invulnerabity of the possible’ [Unverletzlichkeit des Möglichen] which she always shelters according to him.
As a critical response to Heidegger, we could ask ourselves whether today’s cybernetic ‘earth system sciences’ do not allow for a more sophisticated understanding of what Heidegger referred to as the ‘unimpressive law of the Earth’? One that would never be disclosed, that is, through ‘releasement’ [Gelassenheit] and an ‘artless’ receiving of the earth’s blessing? Or to a classic phenomenological analysis for that matter, however profoundly executed. What is more, aren’t we allowed to state that those sciences, thanks to their technoscientific disclosure of the planetary ecosystem, have made us aware of the fact that what Heidegger supposed to be the ‘invulnerability of the possible’ amounts to nothing but an illusory belief?
Heidegger’s Earth, as part of what he later developed as the fourfold [Geviert], considered the opposite of enfaming, is the ever-reliable although hidden ground of world, the ‘building carrying, nurturing fruit bearing [one], fostering water, rock, plants and animals’ [die bauend Tragende], as he writes in the essay ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’. Yet through enframing, first as the development and application of thermodynamic machines and then as the invention of
cybernetic machines man has explicated the Earth as the site of a play of entropy-negentropy (Stiegler 2015), a play in which, as we now know, technics is playing an ever greater – and for the time being overwhelmingly entropic, i.e., destructive – role. But while this might very well be our technological destiny up til now, this does not mean that it will have to be that way forever, as Heidegger himself would have readily admitted of course.
We know that the danger [Gefahr] of technology for Heidegger refers to the becoming exclusive of the calculative-exploitative relation to beings, driving out all other possibilities of disclosing beings and most fundamentally: preventing a more original relation to the openness or freedom of being. As the ‘swaying-forth’ [Wesung] of being itself, in its very ontological essence, technology’s ultimate danger, according to Heidegger, consists in the consolidation or hardening of the complete forgetfulness with respect to being’s openness and this entails a total vanishing of the ‘question-worthiness’ [Fragwürdigkeit] of being, thereby accomplishing the ‘death’ of man’s ‘free essence’: his ontological freedom and his ability to question being.
Now for Heidegger, and this remark will lead into my final reflection on the meaning of the anthropocene, the danger of technology is purely ontological and does not have anything to do with the concrete dangers that really existing technologies, so to speak, might pose to human existence. Yet, what I want to propose on the basis of Stiegler’s conception of the fundamentally technogenic nature of the process of anthropogenesis and accordingly of the original technicity of human existence briefly outlined above, is that the anthropocene, as revelation of the massive and systemic toxicity of (hyper)industrial enframing, makes clear that, pace Heidegger, we do have to understand this danger also ontically, or more precisely: ontico-ontologically, since it is technology as an ontic, empirical phenomenon that conditions the onto-logical or the way we perceive and understand beings.
8. The anthropocene as danger and salvation and the call for an anthropotechnological turn
Given the technogenic nature of the process of anthropogenesis and the original technicity of the noetic and libidinal nature of the human lifeform as existence in the Heideggerian sense that follows from it, we should reconceptualize Dasein’s ontological freedom or openness to being as organo-logically and pharmako-logically, i.e., ambiguously constituted and conditioned by technology. Technology is not just responsible for the progressive closure of man’s openness to being and increasing forgetfulness of being, as the Heideggerian analysis apparently assumes, as
a pharmakon it both closes and opens Dasein’s openness to being and both enables and disables the question(ing) of being.
The danger of technology as the threat of ontological closure and the elimination of the question should be understood from the originally proletarianizing nature of technology as the accidental compensation for man’s original default and re-intepreted thus as the pharmakon’s insurmountable tendency of proletarianization-entropization and thereby of the subversion of the noetic and libidinal capacities constituting man’s openness to being which is the true and ultimate cause behind the geophysical decay that characterizes the age of the anthropocene. It is because of the fundamentally accidental, i.e., concretely technical constitution and condition of all noetic and libidinal potential, such that it constitutes Dasein’s openness to being that the ontological essence of technology sensu Heidegger has to be understood as technological after all and accordingly that the danger of technology cannot be conceived as purely ontological but must be understood ontico-ontologically, as rooted in the concreteness of technological artefacts.
Now, as revealing or exposing the toxic-entropic character of the current hyper-industrial organological configuration, the anthropocene can be said to reveal the danger of technology in this very sense, and as such, i.e., if recognized as such, it can be said to harbor the growth of the ‘saving power’, according to Heidegger’s famous dictum, derived from Hölderlin, that ‘where danger is, grows the saving power’ as well (Heidegger 1977). However, this ‘saving power’ is not pristinely ontological-transcendental in the Heideggerian sense of a re-finding [Einkehr] into what he described in the technology essay as our ‘innermost indestructible belongingness to being’ [unzerstörbare Zugehörigkeit zum Seyn] but pharmaco-logical in the sense of recognizing our onto-logical openness as organo-logically and therefore pharmacologically conditioned, and of perceiving the danger accordingly as a toxic pharmacological situation that calls for a therapy, a ‘healing’, a creative appropriation of our technical, i.e., today digital condition that allows for a new openness and a new ‘question-worthiness’ of being.
Being the ontic condition of all onto-logical openness, it is only from the technical pharmakon that ‘salvation’ can and should be expected, and in that very sense ‘we are condemned to technology’ as Peter Sloterdijk writes somewhere (Sloterdijk 2001). It is not so much an awakening to our ‘indestructible belongingness to being’ that might ‘save’ us as well as the realization that this ‘belonging’ is organo-logically, and that is to say accidentally conditioned and therefore destructible, as well as geo-logically (in the sense of planetary) conditioned and
therefore fragile as well, these two conditions becoming increasingly entangled and co-dependent as the anthropocene makes clear. As such it calls for an anthropotechnological turn, a turn that should be understood as nothing less than a new enlightenment but that is even more so an ontological, or better yet an onto-anthropological turn, a revolution in our understanding of being and in our relation to beings, both to ourselves and to other beings.
What this means in practice, in my view, is first of all that we begin to rethink at a very fundamental level, from a systemic organological perspective, on how we could transform the global technosphere so as to become more responsive and adaptive to the biosphere in which it is embedded and upon which it is ultimately dependent, but which it also increasingly shapes. This shaping however should become a careful and caring, attentive and responsible activity, breaking with the careless, in-attentive and ir-responsible way of doing that has prevailed up til now and is unfortunately still by far the dominant trend. One way to start thinking about such technologies could be through Sloterdijk’s concept of homeotechnology, which refers to technologies that are, unlike the traditional allotechnologies, based on operational principles already existent in living nature itself, like biotechnology and nanotechnology, and that are co-operational with the modi operandi of the vital and ecological systems of the Earth and therefore potentially less entropic.
As Stiegler suggests, the general criterium for inventing the technical systems that would constitute such a new technosphere could be that of negentropy (Stiegler 2015), in all its forms, from the energetic and economic to the noetic and the social, a criterium that should be decisive for the ‘valuation’ of all technological invention and ingenuity (ibid.). But in order to make such a transition at all possible, we should develop, but maybe first of all imagine, technologies that could support and foster our ability, and possibly also our willingness or alacitry, to become more eco-attentive and eco-responsible beings, technologies that would allow for the creation of new forms of global attention and of collective desire and volition – earth-centered, eco-conscious and long-term oriented forms that have never existed before but that might prove vital in the future.
It is precisely the globally distributed digital network technologies, that are now employed overwhelmingly to capture our attention for consumption and mostly mindless production, which are perfecty suitable for a pharmacological re-appropriation, re-programming and re-invention in the above sense that could transform them into a global sensorium and care-taking instrument for
a future earth-caring humanity. Such a re-invention of he global digital networks could enrich and deepen our relations with the biosphere instead of impoverishing and estranging them, i.e., they could become an instrument for (re)-attuning human consciousness and conscience to the ‘life’ of the earth system and for cultivating global ecological awareness.
Big data, robotics, generalized automation and ubiquitous computing are all pharmaka whose functionality could be inverted to support goals and purposes that are radically different from the ones that are pursued now in the context of consumerist capitalism. They could herald an anthropotechnological revolution and with it the coming-into-being of a new anthropos, or better maybe a neganthropos in an allusion to Stiegler. Of course this is a demand that seems far too big, far too unrealistic and far too utopian for the human as we know it, but, as the central guiding thread of Sloterdijk’s radically historical onto-anthropology teaches, humans are those beings that are always confronted with problems that are far too big for them to handle but which they nevertheless cannot escape dealing with, as such always forced to ‘think the unthinkable’, to quote Langdon Winner again. This structural burdening with what the tragic Greeks called ta megala, the big things, is what anthropogenesis or hominization as unfolding of the uncanny or Sophocles’ to deinotaton is ultimately all about (Sloterdijk 2013).
Dealing with the danger of the anthropocene is a tall order, yet, as Sloterdijk writes at the end of his fine little book Unworldliness (Weltfremdheit) from 1993: the true realism of our highly improbable and uncanny species consists in not to expect less from its intelligence than what is demanded from it (Sloterdijk 1993).