Bernard Stiegler’s View of Philosophy of Technology

As a new branch of philosophy, philosophy of technology reminds us, we human beings actually have been living in a technological environment unconsciously like fish in water. It is urgent to interpret the nature of technology and understand what happened between technology and human being. By inheriting interdisciplinary resources, Bernard Stiegler regards technology as a procession of organization of inorganic thing and homo sapiens is just a result of it. Stiegler expand the philosophy of technology to a kind of fabulous thinking of phenomenon, which is possible to relevant more academic issues.

Stiegler interested in the question of technology. Which suggests that he curious about why we recently and suddenly realize the importance of technology after thousand years neglect. Stiegler reads Plato very carefully, and he find out Socrates already warn Plato that writing is poisonous because it cannot express truth perfectly, but Socrates finally tacitly permit Plato to write books because it at least can inscribe a part of truth, which means “default” is the original phenomenon of technology. Stiegler gives a critical interpretation to Western metaphysics duality thinking by reverse the opposition between intelligence and technology, inside and outside, non-thinking and thinking, default and truth, most importantly organic and inorganic.

Stiegler considered that the general Western thinking is trapped by the division of organic and inorganic, “Organic is life, soul, human, spirit, and Inorganic is lifeless, material, machine, technology. This contradiction didn’t concern that every fact is artefact, so there are third being, organic inorganic, which is technology.” There are four core arguments to support his view:
I. Paleoanthropology research find out that silex technology not only making sure our ancestor living and reproducing but also sizing brain and liberating hands then homo sapiens appeared.
II. Philosophy always encounters a kind of ultimate aporia when question the originality or natural state. Rousseau, Plato and Heidegger respectively cannot understand where we from, where is truth, who we are. Corruption, amnesia and worldhistory is unthinkable and unapproachable for Western metaphysics and they in fact all phenomenon of default, which is production of technology.
III. Many philosophies of technology consider technology as instrument, tool, machine or foreign object. Few new philosophies of technology realize that the boundary between human and techno is more and more vague. They all didn’t realize human is a “who” only defined by technological environment, technological system and technological progression.
IV. Technological history proves technology make communication and collection possible, like early city building and writing.

Technology is a kind of gramme, it sets model, time matrix and sequence of human world. In conclusion, Stiegler provides a opening and dynamic view to the relation between technology and human, which can be concentrated to his idea “epochality”, that is actual technology situation what we really set in.

Stiegler’s philosophy is a new progress of so-called French philosophy, he reiterates many important issues like historicity, Greek myth, foundation of metaphysics, phenomenology, photography, literature, Psyche and anamnesis, and he widely embrace many fields which are little noticed by French theory like thermodynamic, paleoanthropology, cybernetics, systems theory and so on. Stiegler’s optimism attitude and positive gesture reflects his front position in Continent Theory. His philosophy of technology fabulously connects Neandertals and future city, unconscious imagination and artificial reality, abstraction and concentration, and give us a new perspective to reconsider modern cultural, economy and politics problem.

Bernard Stiegler’ representative works include Technology and Time (seven volumes and only four volumes published in 1994, 1996, 2001, 2023), The Misery Symbolic 1&2 (2004), European Constitution 1&2 (2005), and For a New Critical Economy Theory (2009).

This work was sponsored by financial support from Social Science Fund of University of South China (Grant No. 5524GC007).

No conflict of interest.

Figure 1:

Bernard Stiegler (1 April 1952 – 5 August 2020) was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of “politicised researchers” His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.