Care in Technology

342 Pages·2022·3.832 MB·English

by  Xavier Guchet

Care in Technology
To Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, who taught me a lot
In testimony of friendship
Innovation and Responsibility Set
coordinated by
Robert Gianni and Bernard Reber
Volume 7
Care in Technology

Xavier Guchet
First published 2021 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2021
The rights of Xavier Guchet to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951011

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-559-6
Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Bernard REBER
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Chapter 1. Care and Technology: An Anthropological
Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. From mastery to care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1. Making good use of technology, anticipating its
potential risks: two possible examples of care in technology? . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2. Do we need to learn to master our technological mastery? . . . . . 11
1.1.3. The limits of the externalist approach to technological
regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.2. In what sense can technologies be “inherently” caregiving? . . . . . . . 27
1.2.1. Can there be an intrinsic morality of technology? . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.2.2. Technology and care: a difficult articulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.3. Taking care of living beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
1.3.1. Care and technology: from ethics to anthropology . . . . . . . . . . 49
1.3.2. Caring about valuating living beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
1.3.3. The difficulty of thinking technology from life . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
1.4. Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
vi Care in Technology
Chapter 2. Technology and Life: Analysis of a Divorce . . . . . . . . . 89
2.1. Body, gestures, technology, production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
2.1.1. Work without skill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
2.1.2. Control and discipline of technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
2.1.3. A rupture in the conception of technology: the divorce
of technology and life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.2. The intellectualist conception of technology: the Kantian
turning point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
2.2.1. Difficulty in thinking of the artisan’s activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
2.2.2. Technology excluded from the field of aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . 130
2.2.3. Technology, a synthetic activity without representation
and without rule. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
2.3. Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Chapter 3. The Conditions of Care in Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
3.1. Vitalist approaches to technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
3.1.1. The concept of technological evolution: contributions
and limits with regard to care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
3.1.2. Technology as an “organ projection”: contributions
and limits with regard to care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
3.1.3. The utopia of Erewhon: analysis of an aporia. First
condition of care in technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
3.2. Philosophical anthropology, a promising way to articulate
care and technology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
3.2.1. Plessner’s biological anthropology: redefining the
concepts of organ and organism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
3.2.2. Industrialization, work, and life. Critique of modernity
in Gehlen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
3.3. The organ-instrument. Second condition of care in technology . . . . . 188
3.3.1. From the organ as part of the organism to the organ
as an instrument with use-value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
3.3.2. Putting the individual point of view first in the ethical
evaluation of technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
3.4. From anthropology to aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
3.4.1. Is it enough to recognize that humans “belong to nature”
to orient technology towards care for nature? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
3.4.2. Creating a new perception. Fourth condition of care
in technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
3.5. Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Contents vii
Chapter 4. Design, Technology and Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.1. At the sources of design for life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.1.1. The premises of design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.1.2. Overcoming the conflict of arts and industry: the rational
aesthetics of Paul Souriau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
4.1.3. Industry and the fragmentation of experience: anthropology
and instrumentality in Dewey’s work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
4.1.4. Life as judge of technology. Lewis Mumford . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
4.1.5. Towards a design for life: László Moholy-Nagy . . . . . . . . . . . 257
4.1.6. Opening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
4.2. Towards responsible and caring innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
4.2.1. Technical activities and care: practical lessons from ancient
China and Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
4.2.2. The square of care in technological design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Acknowledgments
Several colleagues were kind enough to re-read all or part of this book and give
me suggestions for improving it. I thank them very warmly: Bernard Reber first of
all, for his very careful reading and his advice, as well as Emanuele Clarizio whose
comments are always invaluable. Charles Lenay and Pierre Steiner then, who
enlightened me on the TAC thesis and its philosophical sources. Dimitri El Murr
who allowed me to see more clearly in certain terminological problems linked to
ancient Greek.
My thanks also go to Rionne, for his support and encouragement.
Foreword
A good number of the works that combine innovation and responsibility1,
science and society, or even ethics and new, emerging or controversial technologies
do not really take the technologies themselves seriously, nor their relationships to
humans and the environment. To be more precise and less unfair, they still base
themselves upon dualisms: nature/technology, technology/life, technology/humans,
humans/nature, subject/object. What they are desperately lacking is an informed,
balanced, and plausible philosophy of technology. However, this well-documented
work by Xavier Guchet, who leads an interdisciplinary team at the University of
Technology of Compiègne, member of the Sorbonne University Alliance, offers not
only a strong thesis, but is backed up by a panorama as broad as it is assembled to
good use. I emphasize the fact that his immersion in a university of engineers gives
even more credit and plausibility to his work. This book is not only addressed to
philosophers, but to engineers and any person who takes account of our
technological environments2, sometimes as threats, sometimes as sources of
revelation and solutions, but also with a role to play in our definition as humans.
First of all, we have here a state of the art of the most interesting approaches to
the philosophy of technology, ranging from Greek philosophy, especially that of
Aristotle, to contemporary work. Configurations of the debate which we have
inherited from ancient times have not lost their relevance. Against the Sophists who
enthusiastically welcomed the development of technology considered from the
perspective of an infinite progress, Plato’s metaphysics already indicated this danger

1 For a general overview see Sophie Pellé and Bernard Reber, From Ethical Review to
Responsible Research and Innovation, ISTE and Wiley, 2016.
2 One approach that strives to combine technology and ethics is that of Armen Khatchatourov,
with the collaboration of Pierre-Antoine Chardel, Andrew Feenberg and Gabriel Périès,
Digital Identities in Tension, Between Autonomy and Control, ISTE and Wiley, 2019.