Abstract
The opening pathways of the French philosophy of technology derive from the works of Descartes, Bergson, Bachelard, Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem and Simondon. The concept of the Homo Faber is central from Bergson to Simondon, since tools and machines as information and energy resources constitute the principal theoretical problems that lead to a philosophy of technical mentality through the stages of anthropological evolution. Canguilhem, influenced by Bergson, theorised the genesis of intelligence and science by the needs of action from their earlier phases. He avowed at the same time that the intellectual mode of knowledge is not the only possible and primary one, following Bergson in the interpretation of technique as a manifestation of life. The emergence of a French Philosophy of Technology is, moreover, an outcome of the works of Jacques Lafitte, Louis Couffignal, Pierre Ducassé, Jaques Ellul, Marie‐Dominique Chenu, Emmanuel Mounier, Jean Brun, Bernard Charbonneau, Michel Foucault, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, François Russo, François Dagognet, Jean-Claude Beaune, Jacques Viénot, Etienne Souriau, Georges Friedmann, Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Pierre Séris, Pierre Lévy and others.
Keywords: Homo Faber, Tools, Machines, Energy, Information, Technical Mentality
Une technologie se développe dans le règne des fins (Bachelard 1969, p. 155)
From the times of Descartes, Diderot and d’Alembert to those of Auguste Comte and Henry Le Chatelier, in the nineteenth century, the rise of the power of technical and industrial innovation became increasingly entangled with the activities of the professional engineers, as Parrochia (2009) emphasises. Industrial technology, hitherto, could be better grasped through the engineering concepts of chains, networks and systems, according to Jean-Pierre Séris (2013). The notion of a technical system was defined by Jacques Ellul (1977) as an assembly of distinct elements interrelated to each other in such a way that any evolution of one element causes a transformation of the assembly and that any modification of the assembly elicits a reactive feedback to every element. The elements composing the system exhibit a kind of aptitude and preference to combine with each other rather than entering into combination with external factors. The system is dynamic due to the rapports of its linked elements that constantly tend to produce evolution. The relation of the system to the external world is organic, resembling thus to an organism. The concrete study of the technical systems distinguishes between two types of analysis, static and dynamic, according to Bertrand Gille (1981). The static analysis of a system, as a set of distinct elements, grouped together for a certain purpose, is important in measuring its balances, imbalances and mutations, insisting on the consistency and the compatibility of the various operations of the system and revealing a margin of freedom of evolution for the mandatory adaptations. The dynamic analysis of systems aims at technological forecasting, quantifying and evaluating.
A technical system is an instantaneous result of the combination of accumulated realisations of inventions and scientific progress, as the delayed introduction of steam engine shows. The cause of such delays is the excessive compositional complexities of technical systems, which are a consequence of the diversity of applied environments and of the internal structure of the technical system. Technical delay may be also a result of utilitarian considerations and economic conditions. That is to say, utility provides to comparison, coordination and decision making, a real measure. Equations set the degree of technological tasks compatible with returning prices and a whole game of criteria intervenes to justify the methods of economic work, to legitimise its standardisation. This is the ideal of the philosophyof approximation and perfect generality, which eliminates progressively any detail from the system, since the parts of modern industry are totally interchangeable, as Bachelard (1969) observed. Aside from this, not only utility but coarse distrust and disagreement with technological modernity, radical critique of industrial society from the Christian point of view of incarnation, can regard certain technical developments problematical as potential inputs, as Cérézuelle (2005) shows. Hereby the technique is directly connected with the incarnation of divine speech by Christ, as an action of supreme perfection that assists humans to become perfect as well.
1 Science and technique connection
Science is one thing, technique is another: on the one hand, rigor of a theory, on the other, approximate knowledge. Science is an enigma that is reborn, a solution that brings a problem, according to Bachelard (1969). The real, for the researcher, is frivolously possible and the study of the possible becomes an encounter, because of the outstanding difficulty of a constant cognitive accommodation to the present reality. Science is a research for the rational. The technique, on the contrary, is the imposition of the rational. Technique fully realizes its object and the object to be born has to satisfy so many and so heterogeneous conditions, dodging the objections of any skepticism. Technique is a substantiation of factuality in all the meaning of the term. To formulate it more precisely, she is the conclusive element of scientific confidence. Bachelard alluded to Henri Poincaré:
If I welcome industrial development, it is not only because it provides an easy argument to science supporters; it is especially because it gives the learned faith in himself, and also because he offers him a field of immense experience, where he faces too much colossal forces so that there is a way to give a boost (Poincaré 1905a, p. 241).
Nonetheless, human practice is concurrently interlaced with inexplicable discrepancies. It should be necessary, therefore, to maintain a solid practical consistency, the full coherence of an action program, containing the philosophical conditions of its own progress, as Bachelard resolved, pleading thus for an “active pragmatism, desired, built, gradual, true system of projecting will,” striving herewith to unravel the problem of approximate knowledge. It is significant that pragmatism is connected with the competence and progress in built systems, according to Bachelard (1969).
The synthetic a-priori knowledge of science and mathematics is precondition for the building of technology. A mathematical truth is given by intuition, according to Poincaré. A principle is a priori synthetic, if it is not a logical one and if it gives mathematical knowledge, as is the case for induction. This is why, no reduction of mathematics to logic is possible. Therefore, mathematical objects exist in a different manner from logical entities; by analogy, technical objects could be unaccustomed to logical ones. What does the word “exist” in mathematics mean? It means, as Poincaré (1905b) alleged, to be free from contradiction. This idea was disputed by Couturat: Logical existence, as he said, is quite another thing from the absence of contradiction. It consists in the fact that a class is not empty; to say: “There are α,” it is, by definition, to affirm that the class α is not zero (Lolli 2013).
The dissemination of rational mathematic applications has provided the main positivist point of argumentation in favor of scientific management. This ideal was expressed by Jacques Lafitte’s analysis of mechanical organisations, who recognised a correspondence between religion and family, metaphysics and politics, and science and technomorphological structures respectively. Against any technophobic literature, Lafitte made an enthusiastic turn in favour of a general theory of machines and tools as devices that make emancipation possible, in a categorisation from the simplest to the most complex. He distinguished three types of machines: passive (such as bridges and roads), active and reflex. Lafitte also envisioned a unified Mechanology for the ethical education of not only engineers but also humanists.
2 Tools and machines as information and energy resources
2.1 Nature and technique
The interaction between nature and technique would seem as an imitation or else instruction, from Plato’s viewpoint, or as an imitation towards perfection according to Aristotle. The resilience against decomposition and the ability for reproduction distinguishes natural substances from artefacts, since the latter tend to imitate the principles of rational design found in nature. Technical objects, therefore, acquire independent forms of being, which can be grasped by individual and collective technical mentality. Nevertheless, Descartes argued that all things which are artificial are therefore natural, promoting thus a non-Aristotelian idea of nature and technique: “When a watch marks the hours by means of the wheels of which it is made, this is no less natural in itself, than it is for a tree to produce its fruits.”[i] Moreover Descartes stressed that the division between natural beings and automata is only a matter of circumstances and education. He insisted on the argument that there could be no test allowing the demarcation between animals (natural things) and automata taking them as models (Séris 2013).
Georges Canguilhem pointed out that living beings and their forms rarely develop, with the exception of vertebrates, devices which can give the idea of a mechanism. Biology shows that the joints of the limbs and the movements of the eyeball resemble in the living organism to what mathematicians call a mechanism. We can define the machine as an artificial construction, which is the outcome of the work of humans. The assimilation of the organism to a machine presupposes the construction of devices by humans, wherein the automatic mechanism is linked to a source of energy, whose motor effects unfold over time, even after the cessation of human or animal effort that they restore. It is this gap between the moment of restitution and that of the storage of the energy restored by the mechanism that allows the forgetting of the relationship of dependence between the effects of the mechanism and the action of a living being, as Canguilhem (1965) insisted. The consequences of this covertly biological origin of a technical society were infrequently mirrored by philosophers from Aristotle to the present.
The slave, says Aristotle in The Politics,[ii] is an animated machine. Hence the problem that Schuhl[iii] only indicates: is it the Greek conception of the dignity of science that causes the contempt of technology and hence the indigence of inventions and therefore, in a certain sense, the difficulty of transposing into the explanation of nature the results of the technical activity? Or is it the absence of technical inventions that deciphers into the design of the eminent dignity of a purely speculative science, a contemplative and disinterested knowledge? Is it the contempt for the work that is the cause of slavery or the abundance of slaves in relation to the military supremacy that causes the contempt of work? Is it necessary to explain the ideology by the structure of the economic society, or the structure by the orientation of ideas? (Canguilhem 1965, p. 107).
It is interesting that certain classic and Christian authors -as Canguilhem mentions while commenting the works of Père Laberthonnière[iv]– had suggested that certain inventions, such as the horseshoe and the horse collar, were made firstly for slaves and then adapted to the animal. Even if this anthropological conjecture pertained to any sense of correctness, we should avoid the subordination of pluralistic epistemological standpoints to the dominance of antagonistic social and economic relations, obtained under a deterministic “logic”. Predictably, this entrapped insistence on allegedly overarching origins of the technique could become a hindrance to philosophical thinking.
2.2 The chaine opératoire and the Homo Faber
André Leroi-Gourhan explained the process of the hominization through the onset of a specifically human technical mentality. He regarded the tool as the concretization of a relationship between the individual and the environment. He emphasized the continuity between natural and artificial organs, a thought that can be defined as an “organology” (a term used by Georges Canguilhem[v] to describe the philosophy of creative evolution introduced by Henri Bergson, in the tradition of “biological philosophy of technology”).[vi]
The consideration of technique as an extension of vital activity corresponds to an approach that can be defined as organological, into which Leroi-Gourhan explicitly subscribes when he claims the need to proceed with an “authentic biology of technique”. The discourse on technique interconnected with the idea of “life” may originate from Bergson, who recognized the immanence of the vital impulse to every creative act, since life is, first of all, a tendency to act on raw material. It is through the technical activity that the living human takes possession of its milieu, its environment, and transforms it. The argument is supported by a pure anthropological explanation, based on the concept of the chaine opératoire, introduced by André Leroi-Gourhan with the intention to focus on the evidence provided by excavations of a succession of artefacts connected through a meaningful syntax. The technique is simultaneously gesture and tool; their relationship is somehow coordinated and organized by memory, which mediates between the brain and the environment, articulating the syntax of experience. This organic relationship between human technical mentality and material world was touched also by Bachelard:
The impenetrable solid presents itself as a clear exception. The dotted line around it corresponds only to our idle action, to a lazy possibility, to a philosophy of the immediate. If one wants to relate homo sapiens to homo faber, one must consider the latter in all its actions. Homo faber adjusts and kneads; he welds and he grinds. For him, some bodies are juxtaposed, other bodies mingle, others disperse in dust and smoke. The solids give him the great lesson of forms and assemblies. It is from liquids that he receives the no less fruitful and no less clear lesson of becoming and mixtures. It is in the face of the phenomena of dust, powder and smoke that he learns to meditate on the fine structure and on the mysterious power of the infinitely small; in this way he is on the way to a knowledge of the intangible and the invisible (Bachelard 1933, pp. 27-28).
Thus, our species is Homo Faber, whose life is a technical activity of modeling the environment and becoming capable of “making tools to produce other tools”. In this regard, Leroi-Gourhan (1964; 1965) talked about the manufacture as a “dialogue between the craftsman and the material” and of technique as “both gesture and tool.” The organology, therefore, presupposes the irreducibility of the relational point of view, for instance, as the upright position freed the hand from locomotion, the hand then became available to grasp tools while running, in turn freeing the mouth from the demands of hunting and enabling it to develop language.
The Bergsonian distinction between Homo Faber and Homo Sapiens allows Canguilhem to reopen the vitalist thesis of the insufficiency of mechanical philosophy for the understanding of vital phenomena, as Clarizio (2015) insisted. According to this view, Canguilhem pointed out the epistemological value of Bergson’s philosophy, without yet establishing a vital continuity between technical experience, intelligence and science, as Bergson did.
3 Individual and technical mentality
The natural, biological genesis and the history of the individual was a prominent topic of Simondon’s Philosophy of Technology. Simondon aimed at calling attention to the systemic and relational significance of the individuation as a natural phenomenon: the sole principle was “that of the conservation of being through becoming. This conservation is effected by means of the exchanges made between structure and process, proceeding by quantum leaps through a series of successive equilibria. In order to grasp firmly the nature of individuation, we must consider”, according to Simondon (1992, p. 301),
the being not as a substance, or matter, or form, but as a tautly extended and supersaturated system, which exists at a higher level than the unit itself, which is not sufficient unto itself and cannot be adequately conceptualised according to the principle of the excluded middle. The concrete being or the full being, which is to say, the preindividual being, is a being that is more than a unit (Simondon 1992, p. 301).
Simondon insisted on an empirical analysis, which interpreted form,[vii] communication, information, invention as affections of the processes of psychical and collective individuation. His critical attitude towards cybernetics, was conjoined with the implementation of a rich ontological glossary for the genesis of artefacts. Cybernetics represents a universal scheme of intelligibility, which can be analogically compared only with two former cognitive schemes, the Cartesian mechanism and the Antiquity, according to Simondon (2006; 2009a). The general prototype of all machine construction is conceivable through an analogy with reasoning: since the Cartesian res extensa and res cogitans conform to each other with the same mechanical consistency, “the ‘long chains of reasons’ carry out a ‘transport of evidence’ from the premises to the conclusion, just like a chain carries out a transfer of forces from the anchoring point to the last link.” The anchoring point, the analysis, the synthesis and the control are the four rules in both the rational study of machines and the conduct of thought. Transfer without losses is the accomplishment achieved. The application of this principle of transfer without losses to information through cybernetics has been based on the possibility of the mathematisation of automatic regulation apparatuses.
The postulates of technical mentality are detachability for maintenance and study of the entelechy of the designed machines. Affective modalities play a significant role in technical mentality, especially after the rise of the industrial system, which was based on the division between the sources of information (humans) and the sources of energy (nature). The machine represents a relay, capable as both information and energy resource, but distinctly, not mixed or superimposed, as with the tool.
Technical progress is connected through a sigmoid curve with the progress of language, as Simondon (1959) showed, following the path opened by André Leroi-Gourhan. This analogical explanation of the objective concretization of human progress is exemplified by the transformation of religion to theology, language to grammar, and technique to industry.
4 The rigid technology: government, clinic, confession
In general, postmodernist authors, such as Ellul, Foucault and Lyotard, tended to regard technology as dominating surveillance that could relegate human agency to a secondary role, which would be determined by the overwhelmingly specialised technical means of an overarching discourse (Foucault) or systemic milieu (Ellul). By Michel Foucault the use of the term “technology” obtained a rather rigid significance, as “technologies of power,” “technology of government” and “technology of the self.” One instance is “The Incorporation of the Hospital into Modern Technology,” as the reorganisation of the hospitals did not stem from a medical technology but essentially from a political technique: discipline. “Discipline is, above all, analysis of space; it is individualisation through space, the placing of bodies in an individualised space that permits classification and combinations” (Foucault 2007). This development, however, was made possible through the application of disciplinary techniques into asylums, prisons and hospitals, such as the architecture and the statistics.
The practical introduction of the statistical method into clinical medicine took place in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century by the Parisian clinician Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (1787–1872). Louis was the first to attempt the mathematical-statistical evaluation of large quantities of comparable disease phenomena and individual diseases in order to arrive at general statements about the character of certain disease entities. This numerical method was used, for example, in the analysis of phthisis, in typhoid fever or in demonstrating the senselessness and risk of bloodletting in pneumonia. The method had constitutive significance both for clinical research medicine and for a new type of design of clinical pictures. Through introduction of the statistical observation method, the clinic became an object reservoir for research-based medicine, a reservoir not only for cases and signs (Foucault 1963), but for cases as signs. The statistical doctrine of signs of disease, however, had thus assumed the character of a nosological symptomatology. The statistical doctrine looked no longer directly for the individual disease entity, but instead deduced an ideal type of disease from the largest possible number of observations of individual disease manifestations, which in turn had to serve as a normative comparison variable for the individual case.
Foucault distinguished four types of technologies, respectively in the fields of production, sign systems, power and the self. The invention of the technologies of the self originates in the Socratic and Platonic ethical principles to know yourself and to care of yourself, namely to seek for wisdom, truth and perfection of the soul. One of the techniques of the self was introduced by the Christians, with the form of the confession, the publicatio sui of Tertullian, in concordance with the “strict obligations of truth, dogma and canon… The duty to accept a set of obligations, to hold certain books as permanent truth, to accept authoritarian decisions in matters of truth, not only to believe certain things but to show that one believes, and to accept institutional authority are all characteristic of Christianity,” as Foucault (1988, p. 40) notes. In this way, through the practices of subjectivity, discourse, truth and coercion, the Western man became a confessing animal, as Foucault (1990) remarks. Confession is a technique of power, individualization, and domination. Since ethics is the only possible form that freedom can take, as a conscious practice of freedom, therefore, thought is the exercise of freedom, and the concern for self is a practice of freedom.
5 The rise of collective intelligence and ethics
Louis Couffignal and Louis Lapicque had a considerable contribution to the early development of the theory of cybernetics, in collaboration with Norbert Wiener. The theories of communication, information and systems aim not only to develop new scientific hypotheses which can be empirically verified, but also to describe both the inert and the organic by means of a unified theory of being, to transmute what is inert into something living, to make the inanimate intelligent and to spiritualise matter and materialise spirit. This effective generalisation, however, based in the repudiation of their differences and the emphasis on their similarities, if it is taken literally, is nothing else but a conceptual error (Cérézuelle 1998).
The insoluble contradiction between vitalism and mechanism is better exemplified as a critique to exponential development (Charbonneau 1973), which necessitates an ecological personalist response. The unlimited spreading of technological applications and expert systems requires a deeper reflection on languages and semiotic systems, as an attempt to forecast the dynamic interactive writing system of the twenty-first century, after the emergence of the algorithmic medium, as Pierre Lévy suggests. He defines digital based collective intelligence as “a scientific, technical and political project that aims to make people smarter with computers, instead of trying to make computers smarter than people.” Thus, collective intelligence is neither the opposite of collective stupidity nor the opposite of individual intelligence. It is the opposite of artificial intelligence. It is a way to grow a renewed human/cultural cognitive system by exploiting our increasing computing power and our ubiquitous memory (Peters 2015, p. 261).
The idea of collective intelligence was formulated through experiences in knowledge engineering, as a formalisation and transformation of knowledge into data and algorithms. A relevant historical-philosophical term is the medieval notion of the active intellect, which encompasses the whole of human intelligence in the interface between transcendent and immanent. The generalisation of the hypertext is the most typical instance of contemporary immanent collective intelligence. Our symbolic systems, however, are still designed in the basis of automatic copying and static writing rather than automatic transformation (hypertext).
Collective intelligence obtains yet a very broad and urgent significance: by the end of the twentieth century, innovative technological applications opened new areas of philosophical research, such as technoscience (Hottois 1979; 1984; Sebbah 2010; Vincent and Loeve 2018) and bioethical problems (Dagognet 2000), namely, cyborgs (Hoquet 2009), human cloned reproduction, in vitro embryological experimentation (Hottois 2005) and genetics (Lévy 1985).
By the end of twentieth century, international organisations regarded the ethical consequences of biotechnology as a critical research problem. The unacceptability and prohibition of totalitarian eugenics and human cloned reproduction should set up the meaningful itinerary of bioethics and biopolitics, which must guarantee the fundamental and structural values of human and social existence. Through innovation of microbiology, biochemistry, chemical and genetic engineering, and molecular biology the tremendous expansion of biotechnology leads to a dispute which is not only legal, regarding the disruption of the frame of reference due to the inadequacy of previous definitions of death, filiation, etc., but also moral, insofar as it obliges the doctor, the stakeholders and the society to face responsibilities that no reasonable agent had ever faced, as Séris (2013) notes.
The concept of cybernetic modified organisms originates directly from the seminal Cartesian parallelisation of living beings with mechanisms under the general term of automata, which was further challenged by cyberneticians’ claim to go beyond this simple analogy, through their general theory of communication and control plan. This project engages in the utilitarian exploitation of the allegedly unsolvable asymmetries between science and technology, explanation of nature and technical activity, contemplative disciplines and technical invention. Such dichotomies are abundant in modern philosophical and epistemological debates. The introduction of the transdisciplinary term “technoscience” intended to underline the operational dimensions -technical and mathematical- of contemporary sciences, as Hottois (2006) explained. Bachelard, Latour and Lyotard have also contributed to the adoption of this novel term, which boosted the research beyond the frontiers of theoretical and discursive science. On regard of this role of technoscience, normative science and descriptive technique are not the only and probably not the primary distinctions of the thematics of an integrated philosophy of science and technology. Alternatively, we could propose the distinction between systems, networks and developments, whereby the normative stage would be reduced into a period of some decades – at most into a long century- and the magmatic factor of systems, networks and developments would constantly rephrase itself due to certain effects of historical turn and rupture, being for instance in the present the emergence of the magmatic dissemination of algorithms, transistors, computer machinery, internet and mobile communication, which created systems and networks of online commerce, banking, conferencing, participating, voting etc. Of course, in this integrating attempt to grasp the historical change we experience now, it becomes obvious that technology tends to overwrite science. Therefore, technology should be recognised as a rapidly enhancing dimension of the integration in hand and hopefully we could become able to forecast its future development.
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[i] René Descartes. 1644. Principes de la philosophie, IV, art 203.
[ii] Book I, Ch. II, §§ 4-7.
[iv] L. Laberthonnière. 1935.
[v] “Bergson is […] one of the rare French philosophers, if not the only one, to have considered mechanical invention as a biological function, an aspect of the organisation of matter by life. The creative evolution is, in some ways, a treatise on general organology,” (Canguilhem 1965, p. 125; cited by Clarizio 2015).
[vi] According to Bachelard (1933, p. 26). Mr. Bergson has undertaken to bring our fundamental intellectual habits closer to our usual solid experience. According to him, all that is framed, categorical, conceptual in human intelligence would proceed with the geometric characters of a world of solids. The experience of the solids would lead us somehow to solidify our actions. The stability of the lens thus would correspond to the strength of objects.”
[vii] “Matter can be impressed with a form, and the source of ontogenesis can be derived from this matter-form relation” (Simondon 1992, p. 298).
Milestones in the Philosophy, Ethics and History of Science 
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