Care in Technology. Xavier Guchet

      Foreword

      A good number of the works that combine innovation and responsibility¹, science and society, or even ethics and new, emerging or controversial technologies do not really take the technologies themselves seriously, nor their relationships to humans and the environment. To be more precise and less unfair, they still base themselves upon dualisms: nature/technology, technology/life, technology/humans, humans/nature, subject/object. What they are desperately lacking is an informed, balanced, and plausible philosophy of technology. However, this well-documented work by Xavier Guchet, who leads an interdisciplinary team at the University of Technology of Compiègne, member of the Sorbonne University Alliance, offers not only a strong thesis, but is backed up by a panorama as broad as it is assembled to good use. I emphasize the fact that his immersion in a university of engineers gives even more credit and plausibility to his work. This book is not only addressed to philosophers, but to engineers and any person who takes account of our technological environments², sometimes as threats, sometimes as sources of revelation and solutions, but also with a role to play in our definition as humans.

First of all, we have here a state of the art of the most interesting approaches to the philosophy of technology, ranging from Greek philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, to contemporary work. Configurations of the debate which we have inherited from ancient times have not lost their relevance. Against the Sophists who enthusiastically welcomed the development of technology considered from the perspective of an infinite progress, Plato’s metaphysics already indicated this danger of unlimited variation of forms in the polis, by separating Being and becoming, and submitting the latter to the unchangeable order of the former. Even more, Aristotle had already domesticated technology in a quadruple principle of limitation that prevents a collapse into excess: by form (formal cause), by the “implicit forms” of the material (material cause), by the ultimate purpose (final cause) and by the corporeal possibilities of the living being (efficient cause).

      Xavier Guchet therefore presents the broad progress of the biological philosophy of technology, whose connecting thread is the concept of the externalization of life in technology, with great names as Ernst Kapp, Alfred Espinas, Henri Bergson, Edouard Le Roy, André Leroi-Gourhan, Georges Canguilhem, and some lesser known such as William Morris, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gilbert Simondon, whose common feature is that they have considered technology from the point of view of its links with life, with the theme of projection of the organs or of externalization. This also concerns René Descartes, Karl Marx, Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Paul Alsberg, Francisco Varela, Pietro Montani and Bernard Stiegler. It is gratifying that the Innovation and Responsibility set of books devotes several pages to the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, quite unique in this field and little known in the English language, at least in a form which is not solely exegetic.

      One of the originalities of this discussion is the presentation of the Kantian conception of technology as a decisive philosophical reading of the divorce between technology and life, as it was emerging in the 18th century. Kant’s genius is to have endorsed this divorce, while indicating, as if in negative space, the conditions for it to be surpassed. Far from continuing to conceive technology, as had been done before him, as organon, he proceeded to a split in the very concept of technology in parallel with another, that between organic life and the life of any singular rational and moral person. Technology points toward the representation of goals, but it also sinks into the depths of the body to the point of lodging in the automatism of the living machine. It is somewhat mechanical and somewhat finalized, between causation and purpose. We can understand this “somewhat” as “at the same time”.

Companionship with Kant allows Xavier Guchet to discuss the work of Dewey on the aesthetic experience as a perception of the relationship between my action and its effects in the world, between the things I manufacture and the relations that these things will forge with other beings in the world, or recent research in bio-aesthetics. This is the case for example with Montani who sketches a third way, that of the concept of institution, between the heteronomous constitution of the subject and the forms of its experience through technology and the absolute self-constitution of the subject. The concept of institution allows us to say that the subject is not self-created and what brings it into existence is not a set of structures imposed upon it by a foreign authority. The subject does not belong to itself without experiencing a sort of heteronomy.

      Similarly, Xavier Guchet’s book casts a critical eye over the project of the Encyclopédie, following the historical philosopher Michel Foucault in his course at the College of France (1976), but which Kant might also have shared: far from being only a political or ideological opposition to the monarchy and to a form of intransigent Catholicism, the Encyclopédie is a political and economic operation of homogenization of technological knowledge according to four mechanisms for the disciplining of knowledge and technical know-how: a selection separating knowledge into legitimate and non-legitimate; standardization and hierarchization of dispersed knowledges and a pyramidal centralization which allows control over them. If the Encyclopedists cannot be accused of having opened the way to industrial technology or even to the scientific organization of labor, Diderot and his partners had already initiated, in some respects, the expulsion of the craftsman from his know-how of experience, by a formalism that drew up an organization of knowledge and technological practices entrusted to the care of a new category of experts, a certain type of logicians, as Diderot writes.

      These conceptions are only traces of history; projects such as following the traces of Amazon employees, which Guchet describes and aptly denounces, are of the same vein.

      In the relationships between ethics and technology, he is very interesting in the reconfigurations to which he invites us, through his assiduous and precise examination of philosophers of technology, including the “Constitutive/Constituent Anthropological Technology” current, very well represented in his laboratory at Compiègne, as well as the four currents of the biological philosophy of technology which he discusses and distinguishes.

One of the main theses is as follows. It is often and too readily admitted that there is, on the one hand, a positive technology oriented to care and, on the other, a negative technology, animated by the aim of mastery slipping into predation toward all forms of biological as well as social and subjective life. However, according to him, a thought of care in technology includes two fundamental requirements: understanding the technological relationship of human beings to the world according to the category of insertion and not that of mastery, and never forgetting the capacity of individuals for autonormativity³. His intuitions have a long history since these are the Greek analyses of medicine, with their “square of care” which is designed to impose itself as the whole set of guiding principles for the practice of engineers and designers today. This square of care in the design of technology, which he will detail with the support of a large