Too far gone

‘life against life’, techno-science, science-fiction, modernity, Henry, Descartes

I.

Michel Henry diagnosed the malaise of our world as ‘life turning against life.’ We, the living, have invested our powers not in strengthening life, but in denying life, and raging against it. A crucial role in Henry’s analysis is given to the dominance of techno-science. Because of techno-science’s abstraction from the life-world, in favour of a world of abstract and life-less symbols, it lends itself perfectly to the life that has turned against life. 

For Henry’s phenomenologie de la vie, life is essentially an experience of suffering. Suffering, in the neutral sense of under-going. Living, we undergo both experiences of joy, and experiences of pain. To the essence of living belongs this perpetual flow from one modality of experience (joy), to the other (pain), and back again. And to live is to accept this suffering in all its aspects. Now, when we are stuck in the modality of pain, the desire can arise in us, that we would rather not feel or experience anymore. And a choice presents itself: to go forth until the pendulum swings back to the positive, or to say no to experience. When the latter occurs, one comes to will ‘out’ of living. One would rather not experience, than have to experience this pain. This ‘willing out’ is what Henry refers to as ‘barbarism’, the instinct of ‘life turning against life.’ Disillusioned and crushed by the weight of life, the living desire to no longer live. That is, not to die, but to live without having to truly feel the suffering that is life. And as a result, one invests all one’s powers into living a life distanced from the suffering that is life as much as possible. It is death within life. Henry claims that the degree to which techno-science has grown and taken over our world, while other avenues of human activity seem to have become stale or are regressing, is due to a widespread barbarism. Nihilism, a life that is done with living, and that sees techno-science’s abstraction from the life-world as the perfect ally to achieve its ends. In techno-science’s method and results, the instinct of barbarism sees the tool to finally achieve its end. An abstraction from all that makes life living, and the possibility to experience life without having to go through all that makes it living.  

Strictly speaking, Henry is not ‘against’ techno-science. What he is concerned with is a critique of how techno-science has become a tool in the hands of this ‘life turning against life.’ And, if you doubt that it has, consider how the medical-scientific orthodoxy has ruined health in the past few years. How every symptom is suppressed. How man is no longer capable of listening to his own body, and relies solely on abstract studies, even when following these studies leads to a feeling of sickness. The knowledge given by techno-science is taken as truth, even if it contradicts the knowledge that precedes it ontologically and phenomenologically speaking— the knowledge given by the experience of living. And even if it contradicts the knowledge that surpasses it —intuition.

But, we are too far beyond the point of complaining. And to resist the problems of today, it is not enough to critique the problems brought on by this anti-life techno-scientific orthodoxy. What is needed is to imagine what a techno-scientific culture could look like, if it wasn’t driven by ‘life turning against life’. As modern techno-science finally gives barbarism (an instinct as old as life itself) the tools to achieve its ends, it shows only that techno-science holds immense power. And if so, then can this great power not also be used for the opposite instinct? For culture. That is, the desire to express life to a greater degree, to experience more, to invent, and to increase one’s powers. 

An important point in Henry’s analysis, mostly glossed over, is that when techno-science is driven by this life turning against life, this is to the detriment of techno-science itself. A simple example; say that scientific method supposedly tells us that a certain chemical is good for us to ingest or inject, yet we feel terribly sick afterwards. This would be a good reason to assume that something was wrong with our method of investigation, and that we should adjust our method. This is how science advances, by being proven wrong by experience. Now, the problem is that man is disconnected from this knowledge of life/experience. And thus, he goes on with the method, even if destruction follows. How it affects life is no longer an argument against (or for) the value of techno-science. Put differently, for Henry, the application of techno-scientific method should be evaluated on the basis of a very simple question: is it life-affirming, or is it destructive for life? Does it make us stronger, healthier, more creative, and so on? Or does it lead to a stifling of our powers? The problem as Henry sees it is that techno-science has lodged itself away from this criterium of life, techno-science has become unhinged. And that which gave value to techno-science, life, and how techno-science gave value to life, by enhancing it, has been entirely forgotten. 

Of course, we can hardly imagine someone consciously using techno-science to destroy himself. Even the most harmful applications are fed by the belief that one is doing good. At least, most of the time. And so in all, this ‘life turning against life’ is to a large degree something of the unconscious. The vaccine advocate thinks he is doing something good. And the advocate for using AI language models in schools does not consider the negative effects it could have on a child’s capacity for original thought and writing. 

Even the most base desires, ends, and means are in the end symptoms of a desire for the Good. All be it that this desire has become twisted, and is looking for what it seeks in all the wrong places. As the addict destroying himself is doing so to find a love, a feeling, that he feels he needs to survive. In Henry’s framework; at the lowest point of the suffering that is life, the living come to desire ‘out’ of living, but such a desire is only a misguided desire for life itself, that is, for the joyful modality of life that one would eventually end up at if one were to persevere in the suffering. 

For those with eyes to see, it seems hard to deny Henry’s analysis if one takes a broad look at the mainstream cultural landscape. 

All that is good for life is denied. Strange people dream of blocking out the sun. Actively driving oneself into malnutrition through strange diets is seen as a sign of love for the planet. And denying the facts of biology is seen as a sign of progress. You see, in the hands of barbarism, techno-science ceases being a means to unearth the truth, and becomes a way to flee from it. Deny nature, affirm techno-scientific culture. Screens flatten brains, our drugs of choice are sedatives, chemicals instead of food, and so on. All that is living in life is denied. Yet, it need not be this way. A scientific-technological culture is not necessarily anti-life. 

Note: one can reasonably propose that those most powerful do effectively use techno-science to enhance their lives. And that this is precisely the problem; the powerful can use the newest advancements of techno-science for their benefit, while the masses are only given TikTok and ineffective medicine. Such might be the ‘real’ problem. But still, we are concerned with general attitudes here. And the general attitude is the latter —self-denying— application of techno-science, as a means employed by life to turn against itself. 

But in all, the time of critique is really over. And it is much more pertinent to create a vision for the future. 

What this looks like, I do not know. What is certain is that only few can still summon up that strange fascination for progress that men like us had centuries ago. This wild hope of a Galileo, that the book of nature could be fully understood, 17th century dreams of space colonisation, the pursuit of ‘free energy’, the physiological mapping of the body in hopes of finding a truth on which to build health, the revolutions in transportation, all expressions of this original Promethean instinct to explore and create. What you have now is either a fearful resistance to techno-scientific progress, or a techno-idolatry that is guiding us into a new dark age. It would even be bad taste to hope for techno-science to do anything else. Do you not have eyes to see? 

II.

Before modern techno-science became commonplace, it was posited. It was posited as an idea by men not different from us. 

When Descartes posited science, it was immediately posited as science-fiction. In every sense of the term. As a fiction, a model, a map. But the map is not the territory. As a fable, those stories of old that carry a moral lesson. An experiment in world-building, in wild experimentation with modes of life, to experiment with nature and body, to see of what it is capable. A fable, those stories populated with animals displaying certain characteristics of man in exaggerated form, serving the end of teaching us a lesson. And what creatures our science has created for us. The blue-haired guy who cut off his testicles, the junk tweaking in the mall, the good old fashioned bugman, the terminally online incel. All strange creatures that populate our world, all generated by techno-scientific progress. But you see, it is from these modes of life that we can learn. Life in ascent can be divined from seeing clearly what it is not. The wildest experiments with nature, this is what progress has produced. In a different discussion, Spinoza writes: “no one has yet determined what the body can do.” (Ethics, III, P2) It is this strange fascination —what is the body capable of?— that is at the root of our science-(fiction). We talk on and on about God, the soul, virtue, politics, but no one even knows what the body is capable of —both good and evil. Let us first see what is out there, what is possible, before we make any conclusions. Such is the idea of progress. Sounds quite reasonable, no? And as contrary is known by contrary, one should not lament the sights that one sees. The modern project of techno-scientific progress is a taking to the extreme of the conclusions of an ancient spiritual epistemology. A fable, teaching us what the truth looks like by contrast. 

Science-fiction; if our science is only a model, a fable, yet nonetheless needed for grasping the world, then the world is for us to create. Not to be found, but to be created. This is the typical modern idea, found here in Descartes. To be sure, constructivism is still far away. The world is constructed as a science-fiction, but on the basis of the indubitable truths of the Cogito (reason) & the passions (life). Science-fiction is grounded in the truths of the I and the life-world. Importantly, Descartes’ science-fiction is a science-fable. A lesson must be learnt from our models, from techno-scientific experimentation. It must learn us how to conduct ourselves, how to gain greater knowledge of ourselves. And above all, it must show us what not to do. Sure, in this wild experimentation that is techno-scientific progress, casualties fall, after which we adjust our aim. How many will never take a vaccine again after what has happened? How many regret cutting off their testicles now that their bodies are in pain, and their mind is still the same? The science is a fiction, but it has real consequences. 

Descartes’ vision: ‘the world is a fable’, mundus est fabula, fits perfectly into a certain esoteric Christian framework, where the world is a deceptive fiction, and truth is only found in the self and God. The world becomes a testing ground, a place to learn through failure and experience, like a fable. But with Descartes, it is no longer just a testing ground laid before us by God. The world becomes a fable of our own making. And in this sense, we become like Gods. Phenomena do not appear in a world that is given, the world itself becomes an appearance, subject to the laws of invention and creation. Modernity occurs, the true power of the subject shines forth. This power being intimately related to the imagination, the soul as an ingenium. An engineer, creative spirit, and contemplative at once. Truth and construction are one and the same. Descartes mentions that one only truly knows a mathematical proof if one can construct it for oneself. And this becomes the model to think about all thought and truth. If nothing else is kept alive from philosophical modernity’s heritage, let it be this. 

Now, surely, as much as it was an invention, it was also a re-discovery. My philosophy is the most ancient of all, says Descartes. Not only in his recognition of the subject underlying all experience. But perhaps also in his conception of man as the being that imagines worlds. Man as a world-builder. It is the Promethean subject, this time armed with the modern science of body. The animal is given his environment, and his instincts that firmly lock him into place in his environment. It is for man to create his own world, it is for man to create the conditions necessary for him to thrive. He does not have instincts as strong as the animal, but has to postulate and follow his own “Rules for the direction of the mind.” And he has to create models to traverse the world. Such is the discovery of the cartesian subject - the rediscovery of the Promethean subject. But as much as the Promethean subject is often seen as a metaphor for man’s lacking an essence, Descartes gives this subject a new life; the openness to imagine himself, but only on the basis of a firm foundation, the confidence in his own essence as a thinking thing. Man is both essence and existence. The former is given, the latter is for him to create. A middle position. Protected from the meaningless absurdity of something like a French existentialism. Yet equally distanced from the dogmatic for whom man’s being is set in stone, the kind of life that is entirely uninterested in seeing what else is out there, lacking the spirit of adventure, incapable of wonder. 

It is precisely because man has an indubitable and self-same essence, that he can give himself over to creating his own existence. A house must be built on firm foundations. And the stronger the foundations, the higher one can build, and the more experimental one can be. 

It is this Cartesian subject that has the task to create, but also the task to contemplate whether or not his science-fiction helps him get closer to himself. And whether or not his science-fable shows him how to live —as any good fable should do. Does the science-fiction that man has created drag him further away from his essence, as is the case with the technocratic folly, or those disillusioned children who replace their lives with screens? Or does this science-fiction bring us closer to our selves? 

All life clings to what it can use to further its own ends. And so when Nietzsche writes that science can give us insight into the ends we must set, but can not give us these ends themselves, it is precisely this that is meant. The ideals are given by life, and only by life. And fundamentally, they are only two in number: to express oneself to greater and greater degrees, or to blunt off one’s powers. There is life in ascent, and there is life in decline. There is the ideal of getting closer to the beating heart of life, to accumulate one’s powers and flow outwards. And there is the ideal of death within life. Science can show us what life in ascent looks like, and it can show us what death within life looks like. But to will life in ascent over death within life, science has nothing to do with this. This is a question of spirit, of élan. 

III.

Descartes’ science is always already a science-fiction, understood as a fable. An experiment with modes of life, with the end of gaining greater knowledge about oneself. In the Cartesian novel from which we gain so much of our dystopian thinking about the future, it is said: “everything is true, everything anybody has ever thought.” (Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) And you must take this very seriously, beyond the often stale discussions of idealism and materialism and so on. Everything is true in that everything is lived through with the only proof we ever have, the proof of life grasped by Descartes in the Cogito. I can doubt all my thoughts, but I cannot doubt that I am thinking. I think, I am. Videre videor — it seems to me that I see. I can doubt whether or not what I see is true, but I cannot doubt that I am seeing that I see. The truth of self-consciousness, so you will. Everything is true in that everything is lived through with the same proof of truth — Cogito. Delusions are lived through with as much truth as truth. This truth in which Descartes places the mark of certainty, he calls thought. But this ‘thought’ does not signify the thoughts we might have, those things that race through our heads at varying speeds. Rather, it is the immediate awareness of the fact that we are thinking, feeling, and so on. I walk, and I might doubt that my legs are really moving. But I cannot doubt that I have the experience of walking, that I am aware of my walking. An immediate act of self-awareness which Descartes refers to as thought. So why use this term, ‘thinking’, instead of ‘feeling’, or anything else? Descartes is clear on this point; it is merely to avoid confusion. If I say: “I feel, therefore I am”, one could object that feeling presupposes a body and sense organs. But if I say, “I think, therefore I am”, this presupposes nothing except for the immediate act of awareness which is identified as the mind itself, thinking substance. Michel Henry is accurate when he writes: “For Descartes, I think means everything except for thought. I think means life, that which the author of the Second Meditation calls the soul.”  (Michel Henry, Généalogie de la Psychanalyse, 7.) 

Everything can be put into doubt, everything is a fable, but one cannot doubt that everything is a fable. And as such the fable is real, lived through at each point of its existence by the mark of truth — Cogito. And precisely this opens up the imperative to create a fiction worth living in. A certain ‘flattening’ of reality occurs. Everything is the same, a fiction. And only I is real. But this is very different from saying that everything is the same, and that therefore nothing really matters. Rather, because nothing truly matters, except for the fact that it matters, we have the power to actually do something, to create something. We can not wait around for value to occur to us, or excuse ourselves from the task of creation because value would already be given. I once had the opportunity of asking God what I should do with my life, and he answered very clearly, saying that I should do whatever the fuck I want. Such is the truth of radical freedom that lies at the core of our essence. And it is not nihilism, but the condition of possibility for the creation of value, and the truth of responsibility. As some say; not the relativity of what is true, but the truth of relativity. 

It is precisely because truth was discovered as the indubitable truth of self-certainty in the form of the Cogito, that the way was opened up for the wildest imagination, the greatest fictions, and the purest art. These things are not to be separated. The most ancient of truths and the creation of the new. One and the same thing, such is the positing of philosophical modernity with Descartes. 

This power —Cogito— the feeling of oneself feeling — Life. What can it do? Of what is it capable? We don’t even know yet what a body can do. The mere wish to know, to see what is out there. This wish is modernity, and nothing else. One must be light of heart to be animated by this wish. And why would one not be, when nothing is ever lost? Even if we end up in the greatest confusion and are confronted with the wildest deception, even if the world is a lie, even if it is only suffering, I is certain, and this is all one needs to know to conduct oneself with confidence in this life. With Descartes, the most certain of convictions opens up the possibility for the wildest speculation and most violent experimentation. And the extremest of doubts — “am I not living in a dream?”— grants access to the greatest certainty. 

It is on the basis of the certainty of the Cogito that the creation of a world becomes possible. The true science opens up science-fiction. This too is what modernity can mean —truth does not close us off from the realm of possibility, truth is not opposed to creation, but its very ground. On the basis of truth, of the most ancient of truths, do we build a future. Fiction is not opposed to reality. No, the more one is conscious of reality, the more one is capable of fiction. And the more one creates fictions, the more one becomes conscious of the truth. It is very much an aesthetic view of the world. Everything as art. Building a world worth living in becomes possible on the basis of the knowledge of life. Only really, a rediscovery of the most ancient of bonds between art and knowledge, between imagination and reason. A bond which lies at the essence of the Western tradition. The Greek idea. It is Intellect that creates. It is Reason that produces the Ideals that drive us on to create and discover. A bond whose forgetting is nevertheless part of today’s alienation. Art or science, choose. Truth or culture, choose. Michel Henry speaks about a violent battle to the death between culture and knowledge. The latter understood as techno-scientific knowledge that abstracts entirely from the life-world. But this is a war of our own making, of our separating culture and science from each other. Yet, are we not fascinated by science today precisely because it is tied up with technology, responsible for the creations that make the world go round? And ‘culture’ is that domain where we see only stasis, and a violent backwards movement. Increasingly weak and regressive forms, a pandemic of the cliché. Yet here again, it is this same separation that is to blame. This one separation between man as a creative and cultural being, a technological being, and man as a knowing and scientific being. A separation through which Western man lives in a way which is entirely foreign to his spirit. A spirit, grasped in its Ancient Greek form as the unity of creation and science by the ideal of life in ascent. And as its modern rediscovery in terms of the ‘thinking’ subject. 

Later, after already having lost grand ideals, we lose the subject too, as it comes to be seen as the last vestige of a false representation to be shattered. ‘The cogito is a creation, the result of so many processes of individuation.’ But such claims are entirely false, as Descartes’ discovery can not be understood in terms of representation, even though such great thinkers as Heidegger do so continuously. It can not even be grasped in terms of appearing. Subjectivity lies entirely before and beyond representation, it is a matter of intuition and life, pre-representative. It can never be grasped or represented as we do a thing located in space and time. “The arche-originary earth does not move”, says Husserl. And the subject is precisely this earth. And more, it was when the stability of this subject was discovered, that the earth started moving around the sun. 

It initiates movement, but it does not move. Even though its essence is a sort of pure movement, a pure power or force. The center of a cyclone. This is why Henry can say that a philosophy of subjectivity is not of the past, but of the future. Because bad interpreters have only been able to deconstruct a fiction of the subject, a representation of it, never the subject itself. Which is an impossibility. Subjectivity itself is the very instigator of all thought that can itself never be thought away because it underlies all thought and feeling. I can doubt everything, but not that I doubt, that I think, that I am. “It seems to me that I see”, and I am this seeming. A pure vision, that is only vision. A seeing that sees itself. Such was the ground for common sense, which is really not the form by which state dogma injects itself into thought, but the power that prevents thought from any capture by what is foreign to it. Now this subject —life— , is that which unites the dual project of reason and invention, of science and fiction, of knowledge and art. It is the scene on which all tragedy presents itself. This subject was the re-discovery of the most ancient of ideals — the ideal of the great man. Which is, the ideal at the root of all culture. To mould oneself and one’s people into a superior version of oneself. A version which is understood as a version of oneself that is closer to its own essence. Henry can say that a philosophy of subjectivity is of the future, because every time man encounters his essence, he becomes conscious of his capacity to create a future. Alternatively, he who thinks himself away, has no foundation on which to create. 

To be sure, the so-called surpassing of the subject in post-modern and contemporary philosophy is a fiction that, if anything, can only lead to a stronger affirmation of what it attempts to destroy. If all representations surrounding the subject have been deconstructed, what remains is the will of this subject itself. When it no longer carries the name of a particular representation, political ideology, or anything else, it will recognize its name in its blood and spirit. And in nothing else. Hence the destruction of ideals brings to light the only thing that can never be destroyed and that is forever worthy of love and honour: “great individual human beings.”(Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic age of the Greeks). An ideal, of which Nietzsche writes that no subsequent enlightenment can take it away. Enlightenment can only reveal. What did Kant find at the depths of his investigation? Ideals, understood as pure problems that drive us to know and create.  

Now, this ideal, it requires the union of knowledge and creativity for its completion. A union grasped among other things in the idea of tékhnē —the entirety of the crafts, arts, and creative sciences. But more importantly, tékhnē is that power of man that makes all these things possible. 

In a different context, trying to prove the powerlessness of the human being, 17th century Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx writes: “that of which I do not know how it happens, that I do not do.” From this axiom, Geulincx derives a radical determinism. I do not know precisely how my arm moves, how all the different muscles and nerves interact to result in the movement of my arm. And therefore, I cannot possibly claim to be responsible for the movement of my arm. Geulincx attempts to prove our impotence as creatures on Cartesian foundations that originally served to enhance man’s powers. Foundations that, contrary to popular belief, can bring us closer to our selves and nature. 

That of which I know how it happens, that I can do. That of which I know how it happens, that I can create. And, says Descartes, that which I know how to create, only this can I claim to truly know. One only truly knows a language, if one is able to construct new ideas with it. 

Knowledge leads to action, knowledge leads to creation. Knowledge leads to art, and art leads to truth. All indictments that ask of you to restrain your thirst for knowledge, that shame you for your questions, or your so-called ‘hubris’, all of this is foreign to you and where you come from. It is the influence of an already beaten life, the type of life that tells you to renounce your dreams and calmly take your place in the industrial death mill. Truly, in philosophy or in life, it is the same disease. A turning in which one fails to recognize τόλμα as the original movement of divinity, and comes to see it only as a blind arrogance opposing itself to the divine.

IV.

When life is in decline, it splits up its faculties, and these faculties end up turning against each other. And you get the war between faith and reason. The conflict between culture and knowledge. The fight between memory and the creation of the new. One seeks the new to erase the past. Or one allows the weight of the past to make novelty impossible. All these stupidities arise only when man has lost sight of the one true philosophy which has as its end the development of all of man’s faculties in accordance with one ideal: the great human being, in harmony with what is and was, able to bear what presents itself, and able to create what is required by the future. When life is unable to bear the concentration of its different faculties under one overarching end, it disperses, and the various little lives turn against themselves. Such is the dynamic of life turning against life; man attacking parts of himself with other parts of himself. Man is split off from himself, and that which has lost sight of itself turns against its self. In our present discussion, man’s nature as a cultural being is split off from his nature as a scientific & knowing being, and again, from his nature as a technological being. With Descartes, it was the idea of the subject and a generosity born out of a natural confidence, creating a future in complete freedom. And once very long ago, it was simply the idea of the great human being, conceived of in terms of nobility. Science can show us what a great human being looks like, and what it doesn’t look like. And technology can aid us in creating such a human, the pursuit of which is called culture. But this ideal itself, science knows nothing about it, and neither does the scientist. 

Techno-science can aid us in fulfilling an ideal, but it cannot give the ideal itself. Now, do not get me wrong. I am not a proponent of such trans-humanist programs that propose the creation of a new type of human fully merged with technology, distanced from the natural world and its rhythms. By all measures, man’s health seems to be inextricably linked to his connection to the earth. But neither am I of the type that thinks advanced technologies will end humanity so easily, as if it were pure necessity for it to do so. It is not over in this regard. Except maybe for those who tell themselves that it is. I think in many of the principal critiques of techno-science and its reign over our lives and thinking, too much power is given to techno-science. If the machine can so easily kill your spirit, what precisely is the problem? The machine, or your lack of spirit? 

What is necessary is a vision of the future that incorporates technology in a mature way. Even if I do not know where this will go, I do know that a man scared of what is evolving around him —bad and good— is not a healthy man. Equally disturbed, is he who is driven by the paranoid desire to technologically fix himself as if he were only a summation of problems.  

What is needed is a vision that surpasses the opposition between luddite techno-phobia and trans-human techno-idolatry. This is certain. And I cannot help but wonder if it does not display our own inadequacies, that we cannot dream in tandem with technology like we once could. 

A Leibniz dreaming of visiting different planets, the age of exploration, Descartes’ fascination with anatomy, the Futurist admiration for speed, and so on. Today it seems, exploration is undertaken only out of a desire to flee from something that is broken. The material sciences of body can only be seen as representative of the failures of a corrupt industrial complex, and accelerating speed is only equated with the administration of fear, no longer as the energy with which life in ascent goes forth —fearless. 

There is little vision concerning technology today. Fundamentally because we have externalised technology as a mere tool, no longer seeing it as the natural avatar of that which makes us who we are — the unity of knowledge and creation. 

V.

Henry says that life has turned against life. And techno-science is the chosen tool of this dying life to achieve its ends. But in a much deeper sense, the issue is precisely that life comes to see technology as a tool to fix the supposed problem of the suffering that is life, instead of affirming this suffering. And it is this same attitude, the coming to see technology as an external tool to fix the problems of life, that is also at the root of the technophobe’s attitude. One fears technology as this autonomous entity that will swallow us. And doing so, one is alienated from technology’s essential relation to man as a being of tékhnē. In both the technophobic and technophilic view, technology is seen as a separate entity that will either destroy us, or save us. And one lives under the idea that the more technology advances, the more autonomous it becomes. For the technophile, this means more distanced from natural life, and thereforre more able to solve the problem that is life. For the technophobe, this means more distanced from natural life, and therefore more able to destroy life. Both fail to understand that it are the living that are the greatest enemies of life. Gilbert Simondon notes that it is not of the nature of technological evolution for technology to become increasingly autonomous. Rather, the more technology advances, the more dependent on human input and freedom it becomes. A mechanical clock is set in place and runs its course. The digital clock however, it has to be charged, it has to be connected to the internet to be able to tell the time, and so on. AI language models, far from being an autonomous entity ready to crawl out of your screen, is extremely dependent on human input. And the better we want the AI to work, the more human input we must give it. This is clear with those who are experimenting with the AI language and imaging models. Those who expect the AI to do everything for them, they only end up with the worst of clichés. Those who put in the work of devising the right prompts and so on, thereby maximizing the level of human input, can actually come up with interesting work. The more one conceives of technology as autonomous vis-à-vis man, the worse technology’s effects on man.

Technology solves problems, evidently. But more fundamentally, the more technology advances, the more it reveals ourselves to us. That is, the more advanced technology becomes, the more it reveals the necessity of our own choices, our own capacity for thought and vision, to make sure that the techno-scientific world we create is of any value. The terror of the coming age of advanced technology is not the terror of technology as an autonomous organism that will surpass the human. Rather, it is the terror of being confronted with ourselves, a demanding of us to become capable. To make use of our freedom in a way that is life-affirming. The more advanced technology becomes, the more it becomes evident that our choices matter. The more techno-science advances, the more it becomes clear that we shouldn’t just create any science-fiction. For the more advanced the technology, the more serious the possible consequences of our using it like children.

Such is the nature of technology —the great revealer. In this sense, technology is not so much a tool to solve our problems, as it is a mirror in which we see our problems reflected with increasing clarity. 

With Descartes, philosophy begins with the new. That is, with invention. The new method, the new science, the new life (the realisation of our essence and the resulting conversion to generosity.) But it is clearly understood that this can only be done on the basis of the most ancient. And it is this intuition that modernity represents: the road towards a creation of a future, and the road towards a discovery of the ancient, is one and the same. Here, modernity represents a going beyond the opposition between progressivism and conservatism, in philosophy and in every other avenue of human activity, including technology. And so, Descartes says, every time someone can truly tap into that which is most ancient, a path to the future is opened. And every time someone can truly think anew, the most ancient shines forth.