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Human, Nature, Technics – what is the relationship between these terms?
From the perspective of nature, the human can be classified as an animal. Although we tend not to think of ourselves as wild, savage or primitive, we are nevertheless primates. We often distinguish ourselves from other animals by our capacity for self-conscious thinking – our ability to think of ourselves and each other as thinking beings. To do so we must have some implicit understanding of the relationship between being and nothing and, by association, what life is and what it is not.
As self-conscious beings, we are capable of thinking the concept of own humanity – what, despite our differences, we share with other humans and what distinguishes us from other living beings that think and exist in a manner different from our own. When we say that something is humane, we imply a capacity for ethical judgment that is fundamental to being human. All such judgments carry a certain moral valuation and categorization in which we decide whether certain behaviors or ideas are positive or negative and whether they are to be included or excluded from our understanding what humans ought to be. But because it’s impossible to account for the unique humanity of every singular human being, the foundations of what we call ethical, moral or humane will always be ideological to some extent. However well-intentioned and inclusive such judgements may seem, they imply that whoever or whatever deviates from this idea of human nature becomes less human and less natural in doing so.
Now if we think about how technics relates to the human and to nature, we should remember that what we call technology today derives from a much broader concept of ability, craft and technique. The ancient Greek concept of τέχνη, might refer to any form of making or doing.1 When we speak of technics we are referring to this older more inclusive concept which ranges from the most rudimentary tools to the most high-tech, computerized systems.
Even the earliest theories of technics tend to regard it as something unnatural. History and mythology abound with tales of an original nature and a technics derived by manipulating and deviating from the natural order of things. But how do we simply think our way outside of nature – how do we reflect accurately upon ourselves in relation to the only world we have ever known – the horizon within and foundation upon which all thinking has taken place? While we tend to think of technics as something that differs from the human and the human as something that differs from nature – it’s also worth considering the possibility that technics is essential to the idea of the human and nature alike.
It’s easy to blame our all-too-human nature for this desire to know the unnatural. But what could be more natural than this desire to know – this taste for apple technology? Or to trade Christian mythology for Greek, we could ask how this Promethean gift, this fire stolen from the gods to make up for our lack of natural capcities, makes human nature different from nature nature.2 So many mythologies represent technology in this way: as something that is paradoxically natural and unnatural, human and inhuman. In so many moments throughout our everyday life, too, we take our technical mastery for granted as if it were a second nature only to curse it the next moment as if it were something contrived with the sole purpose of torturing us. Rarely do we consider just how natural it is for us to appreciate nature only once it has been reflected or enframed (ge-stellt).3 We yearn to return to a more natural state, so that we can instantaneously notify everyone of how natural things are.
Today the term organic implies something in a pure, authentic, natural state uncorrupted by modern technology. But this ideology of the organic tends to overlook that the need to differentiate organic from inorganic is a very modern problem necessitated by very modern pollutants, involving evaluations and regulations that would make a peasant farmers head spin. This is to say that the technicity of the organic is somewhat at odds with our natural ideals. Especially since, in its simplest, most literal sense, the term organic denotes a belonging to a larger organism or organization. If this were our understanding of organic, wouldn’t human civilization constitute the most organized organism nature has ever produced? At what point does the growth of human culture shift from organic to artificial?
How would we prove that that technology is any less natural or human than the crafts, abilities and techniques out of which it is constituted – the oldest and most ubiquitous of which would have to be thinking itself. If thinking is human nature then isn’t everything that results from this capacity , to some extent, natural and human as well? Does science not resemble the organization of nature from which it emerges (e.g. mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology)? It is difficult even to imagine a complex scientific system without drawing upon the metaphorical structure of the tree that roots itself down into the ground (of facts or data) so as to extend branches outward and upward toward the light (of reason or truth). Or that’s the idea anyway – what we could label the organicist ideology of scientific method. Within this grand tree couldn’t we almost envision the human as a technology of nature – a Being crafted from eons of natural, biological techniques that were at work long before the first primates and the most primitive tools? The human as a technology through which nature becomes conscious of itself – sounds a bit farfetched, a bit ideological, but is it really any more ideological than saying technology is unnatural or inhuman?
To examine this let’s turn to the taxonomic tree of evolutionary biology – a tree that reaches from the oldest, tiniest microorganisms to those strange promethean beasts that now dictate the fate of all life on Earth. At the root of this tree we have domain followed by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. The first domain, prokaryote, includes the oldest kingdoms (bacteria and archaea) life forms that were able to survive and reproduce in the most unlivable environments thanks largely to their minimal cellular organization . All other kingdoms (protozoa, chromista, fungi, plantae, animalia) belong to the eukaryotic domain which is characterized by a more robust cellular organization capable of supporting multicellular life. The human belongs to the animal kingdom, chordata phylum, mammal class, primate order, hominid family, homo genus and sapiens species.
The term animal is derived from anima, meaning soul, not in the sense of something subject to everlasting damnation for even mentioning evil-ution, but more in the sense of a self-awareness. Animals are animated by an intelligence that can no longer be understood simply as the neurological impulses of a body seeking minimum requirements of self-preservation. Which is why animal kingdom is often regarded as the kingdom in which any significant structure of self-consciousness and technical knowledge develops. As chordates we have a more structured, cord-like, nervous system. Many of us even have something resembling a brain. As mammals, we have mammaries (or breasts) that allow for nursing and, consequently, a longer interval of nurture in which one or both parents remain present in the newborn’s life until they reach the point of maturity. This feature of the mammalian class is often associated with the emergence of the family as a social unit. As primates, we have greater dexterity than other animals – opposable fingers or toes that allow for the highly coordinated manipulation objects and, eventually, tools and technologies. As humans, we possess refinements exceeding even the greatest of apes, the most prominent of which is the sapience or wisdom after which our species is named.
Thus, we can trace our sociocultural and technological organizations in organs and organisms that far predate homo sapiens and, hopefully, appreciate that the genetic evolutionary structures that characterize the human world did not magically spring up overnight. In sketching our position within the taxonomy of living things, we must remember that the system itself is a tool, a technology for differentiating general tendencies that does not encapsulate the specificity or singularity of life itself. It would be as naive and reductive to regard the human brain as unique cause of consciousness as it would be to regard breasts as the cause of family formation, or the thumbs the cause of technical ability.
If we recognize life itself as a biotechnical system, then we begin to see that the human does not invent technology any more than Thomas Edison invents electricity or Elon Musk invents cars. When dealing with systems such as these, we need to develop a much more nuanced understanding cause and effect so that we do not attribute to a part or component what could only come to be within an entire system.4
Is it even possible to separate human, nature and technics without succumbing to an irrational ideology of human nature? Or, put differently, is human nature always metaphorical – a second nature we invent to avoid or suppress the complexities of the first? Perhaps human thought is a defective technology and ideology, the defective source code. But even if we must eventually, artificially separate human, nature and technics, this does not mean that we cannot deviate from their ideological orbit and attempt to grasp the singularity of these mutually implicating systems and the ways in which they bridge the natural and artificial world.
Footnotes
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Cf. Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time ↩
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Cf. the many depictions of the Fall of Man. ↩
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Cf. Heidegger’s formulation of technology as ‘enframing’ or, in a Andrew J. Mitchell’s more recent translation, ‘positionality.‘ ↩
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Cf. the concept of causality, invention, and the expansive history of its critique. We might only trace but one lineage of this critique that strives to confront the question of technology as such finds itself confronted with the question of causality as such. I am thinking here of the works of Heidegger, Stiegler, Derrida, Simondon et al. ↩