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2 Philosophy and Technics: Human Beings and Technical Objects What Makes Us Who We Are On the relationship between human existence and technics, thinking and technology, and the philosopher and the technician Mats Andreas Nielsen Thesis presented for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY Supervised by Professor Arne Johan Vetlesen Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITETET I OSLO Spring 2017 II Mats Andreas Nielsen What Makes Us Who We Are On the relationship between human existence and technics, thinking and technology, and the philosopher and the technician III Abstract This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question. © Mats Andreas Nielsen 2017 What Makes Us Who We Are: On the relationship between human existence and technics, thinking and technology, and the philosopher and the technician http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo IV “Humans make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but out of the actual given and transmitted situation. The tradition of all dead generations burden, like a nightmare, the minds of the living.” Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852/1937, tm.). “From the emergence of Homo sapiens, the constitution of an apparatus of social memory dominates all problems of human evolution.” André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (1964/1993: 229). “A tool is, before anything else, memory”. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994/98: 254). V Acknowledgements A great many people are to be thanked for the fact that this thesis came to fruition and now lie in your hand. Arriving at such an endpoint was not a given throughout the process of writing this thesis, as prolonged illness impeded not only its progression, but veined my motivation for and belief in the project. It is thanks to a number of warmhearted individuals that these obstacles were eventually overcome and to whom I now would like to extend my gratitude. At the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at The University of Oslo, thanks are due to Professor Øyvind Rabbås, for whom I had the pleasure of serving as a Research Assistant throughout my time working on this thesis. I am also grateful to Professor Ina Blom for allowing me to attend a PhD-workshop on media archaeology and through whom I had the opportunity of discussing Stiegler’s philosophy with Cathrine Malabou in what turned out to be an enlightening, if somewhat confrontational exchange at the Academy of the Arts. Professor Arne Johan Vetlesen is to be thanked for his supervision of what turned out to be quite a bulk of text. Our discussions, and the various disagreements voiced as part of them, were of great assistance, especially in the final stages of the writing process. Lastly, I would like to extend my thanks to the many fellow philosophy students with which I have discussed the topics presented in what follows, and whose encouragement and attentive listening have been much appreciated. At the Department of Media and Communications special thanks are owed to Professor Liv Hausken and the entire Media Aesthetics research group for generously taking time out of their busy schedule to read and give feedback to numerous drafts and associated papers that eventually merged into the thesis now before you. The moral support and scholarly community I found in the monthly multidisciplinary forums organized by this network of engaged researchers has been immensely important to me, and for which I extend my thanks to Steffen Krüger, Susan Falkenås, Andreas Ervik, Gry Cecilie Rustand, Sara R. Yazdani, and all the other regular participants of the Media Aesthetics seminar. My family – my mother Ingunn, my father Oddbjørn and my sister Elisabet – are to be thanked for their moral support, encouragement and general aid over the course of these last few years. Elisabet is also to be thanked for her helpful spelling corrections and general language advice, as is Sindre Fjeldstad, whose comments and corrections were highly instructive in the final frantic days leading up to the submission deadline. The warm friendship and loving support of Emilie Martine Berget has to be mentioned, as it has been invaluable to me throughout the writing process and the extended period of illness during which philosophizing at times proved difficult. To her I am incredibly grateful. Finally, my dear friend Niklas Bystrøm Larssen is owed thanks for weathering me through what has not always constituted fortuitous circumstances for studying and writings. Our late-night discussions over a “snitt & fernet” has undoubtedly had an impact upon the contents of the pages that lay ahead, whether for good or ill I leave for the reader to decide. M. A. N. Oslo, June 2017 VI Foreword Before turning to the elucidations and critiques, the speculative historical narratives and the phenomenological analyses, that collectively make up the thesis that now lay before you – the printed copy of which you might be holding in your hands at this moment or, rather, perhaps you are currently scroll through it with your hand, fingers and mouse as it is displayed as a digital document on a liquid crystal display – I would like to offer a few clarifications concerning the technical terminology I employ in regards to my questioning of philosophy’s traditional understanding of the technical and the human over the course of following pages. Firstly, I will note that the two general terms ‘technics’ and ‘the technical’ will be used interchangeably throughout the thesis. I acknowledge that these terms are not widely used outside of academic contexts in the Anglophone world, but related terms in German and the North Germanic languages such as ‘der Technik’ or the Norwegian ‘teknikk’ are, on the other hand, still part of common and non-academic language. Another related term ‘la technique’, employed by quite a few philosophers of central importance for the arguments and narratives offered in the proceeding, while arguably serving a more specialized function in French, is nevertheless also quite commonly used. In other words, both the German and French language have a wider spectrum of terms concerning the technical still in common usage, than is the case in the English language, whose ‘technique’ does not carry the general denotational significance of either ‘der Technik’ or ‘la technique’. For the term ‘technique’ unhelpfully connotes a certain antiquatedness and the usage of pre-industrial technical objects, which bring to mind the traditions of artisanal craftsmanship, especially when it is employed in a more general sense as concerning technique as such, at least outside of its more common employment within discourse concerning sports and the classical arts. In any case, I will largely follow the choices and differentiations made by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins in their translation of the first volume of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s series of books published under the header Technics and Time throughout the breath of this thesis (1994/98). Beardsworth and Collins offer the following words of clarification concerning the recurrent terms ‘technics,’ ‘technique(s),’ ‘the technical,’ and ‘technology’; “The French terms une technique and des techniques, referring to one or more individual, specialized "techniques," are translated as "technique" and "techniques." The French la technique, referring to the technical domain or to technical practice as a whole, as system or result, is translated as "technics" or "the technical." The French la technologie and technologique, referring to the specific amalgamation of technics and the sciences in the modern period, are translated as "technology" and "technological." When hyphenated (la techno-logie, techno-logique, etc.), the terms refer to the thinking and logic of technics and are translated as "technology"” (1994/98: 280-1n1). Concerning these last hyphenated terms I do, however, depart from Beardsworth and Collins’ translation and stick with the hyphenation in order to avoid any unnecessary confusion. I should also note that I will be using these renderings, or similar available options, in translating analogous terms in the German of Martin Heidegger. Doing so, among other reasons, in light of the fact that the French translation of “Die Frage nach der Technik” bears the title “La question de la technique” and that Stiegler employs the term ‘la technique’ precisely when commenting upon his Technikphilosophie.
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