Care in Technology. Xavier Guchet
she had made, Jupiter (Jovis) came by. ‘Concern’ asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While ‘Concern’ and Jupiter were disputing, Earth (Tellus) arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn [that is, Time] to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Concern’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called homo, for it is made out of humus (earth).
Commenting briefly on this fable, Heidegger notes that Concern or Care is not envisaged only as that to which the human Dasein remains committed during its entire life and as that which constitutes it, but that “this priority of ‘care’ emerges in connection with the familiar way of taking man as compounded of body (earth) and spirit” (Heidegger 1962, p. 243).
The meaning of the fable is that the human being will only be a composite of body and spirit at its death, and at this time only can the sharing between Jovis and Tellus be made; before this, what defines the human is the fact that it lives, that it is a living being. As a living being, the human is one, not split, care being precisely that which prevents the split between its natural and not-natural parts. Care, in terms of the human being, means above all else refusing any form of split between the body and the spirit: there is not, on one side, care in the sense of purely technological caregiving, with an objectivized body as its area of intervention; and on the other side care in the sense of taking care, attentive to the human being as spirit and free will. Care cannot be two cares, it is a unity or nothing at all9.
This requirement of unity in care, an indivisibility of caregiving and taking care, has been particularly pronounced in the field of medical ethics, except however that these two aspects of care, although not separate, are not so much merged into a truly unitary care. There are two layers of care and they are clearly hierarchical. It has in effect become a commonplace to recall that the therapeutic act in the technical sense of the term, that is to say caregiving (cure), is devoid of any moral value if it is not inserted into a more essential relationship of care which envelopes it. The greatest risk is that, while thus conceived according to a two-layer model, care becomes precisely two quite distinct and unrelated cares – and even worse, that care within the meaning of caregiving will eventually prevail over care within the meaning of taking care. As psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott deplored at the beginning of the 1970s, “Cure, in the sense of remedy, successful eradication of disease and its cause, tends today to overlay cure as care” (Winnicott 2017, p. 192). However, as stressed by the preface writers of an Italian collective work (Donghi and Preta 1995), the risk of splitting care and giving priority, as Winnicott deplored, to cure as remedy over care, results specifically in an inability to properly pose the problem of the relationships between body and spirit, and their unity. In other words, a relationship of reciprocal implication is forged here between, on one hand, the conception of the human as a living being – but in the sense of a being composed of body and spirit unified by care – and on the other hand, a two-layer conception of care.
However, this two-layer conception of care, well documented in the field of medical ethics, does not confine itself there: it is also found in the invocation of care for nature and it leads to a blurring of its meaning. Not, incidentally, that any idea of care for nature should invariably find its only possible model in medical care (Pierron 2019). Thus, van Rensselaer Potter, one of the theoreticians of the concept of bioethics, considered that medical bioethics, far from being possibly the basis for a global concept of care by extension of the care due to humans to the care due to nature, was on the contrary only a shrinkage of a broader concept of bioethics, linking human health and health of the environment (Gaille 2013). That being said, the need to establish a hierarchical relationship between cure and care now extends to the whole set of activities where care is required. The penetration of the ethics of care into environmental ethics illustrates this phenomenon of extension: we are required not only to interact in a prudent and careful manner with nature, but also to assume that these interactions are of a moral scope and that, therefore, we are morally obliged to comply with the values of prudence and fair measure.
In its most general sense, the idea of care for nature therefore points towards the same two-layer conception of care as that of medical ethics. It is still a matter, here as there, of conceiving care as a single care; however, this care does indeed have two layers in a hierarchical relationship. On the one hand, there is the properly technical level of care, which is the care that we must take of natural things if we are to succeed in our undertakings, in order to avoid the misfortunes of the man of Song. Mengzi, a Chinese philosopher of the 4th century B.C.E., a follower of Confucian thought, tells us that “a man of Song10, distressed to not see his plants growing fast enough, had the idea of pulling on them from above. Returning home in haste, he said to his people: “I am tired today, I have been helping the corn to grow long” (Mencius, 1970, p. 190). On hearing this, his son rushed to go to see, but the shoots had already dried. Here is an unwise technical act, harmful due to lack of attention and care brought to the specific needs of the plants; but there is also, on the other hand, the moral layer of care, which must provide technical acts of care with their guiding values. The two-layer conception of care extends to nature particularly when it is assigned an intrinsic and not only instrumental value11: moral respect for nature must regulate the technical acts that are deployed.
I.3. The intellectualist conception of technology
There is moreover a conception of technology implicit in the two-layer model of care. This model is in fact underpinned by three assumptions affecting the relations between human life, technology, and care. The first assumption is that human life can be summed up in two dimensions which are difficult to definitively articulate: life is understood on the one hand according to the dimension of the being-in-life, and on the other hand, as a life of the mind. We are “first of all” living beings according to Lévi-Strauss, which means that we are “subsequently”, also, something else than living beings. We are not cut off from nature, certainly, but that does not mean that we have absolutely no exteriority in relation to it.
The other two presuppositions of the two-layer model of care relate to the very concept of technology. On the one hand (and thus the second presupposition), technology is defined as the whole set of means available to us to be able to intervene in nature, both inert and living, from a point of view exterior to it. This conception of technology is intellectualist. Technology is the means by which intelligence intervenes upon nature as upon an external, receptive material.
On the other hand (third presupposition), technology as such, or at least a certain type of technology, is considered to be incompatible with care. The two-layer model of care, affirming the unity of all care, is certainly unequivocal: no relationship of care cannot be conceived without technology. A negligent action, performed without precaution and devoid of any real involvement of the one who performs it, is not in the service of care. A gesture that is not careful, that is to say which is not executed with the required technique (which is learned and requires training) cannot be caregiving – such is the message of the parable of the man of Song. Caregiving requires competence. That being said, when technology refers no longer to modestly equipped know-how but to the innovations of chemical and mechanical industry, for example, its relationship to care appears less obvious, more external, and more conflicted. In sum, there are two conceptions of the relationship between care and technology: a relationship of necessary implication on one hand – there is no care without the security of a controlled and properly equipped action, whether it is care for humans or care for nature; on the other hand, a relationship of exteriority in principle, making problematic the possibility of caregiving when the concept of technology signifies, to continue the example, the devices of mechanical industry and chemical products.
The first assumption, affecting both contradictory meanings of the concept of life, is