the security of a controlled and properly equipped action, whether it is care for humans or care for nature; on the other hand, a relationship of exteriority in principle, making problematic the possibility of caregiving when the concept of technology signifies, to continue the example, the devices of mechanical industry and chemical products.
The first assumption, affecting both contradictory meanings of the concept of life, is absolutely essential and commands the other two. Indeed, it is because life, in humans, is regarded as dual, consisting of a subject pole (intelligence, the spirit) and an object pole (the body, the being-in-life), that technology must inevitably be understood according to the same division: it is an emanation of the subject pole and it applies to the object pole from a point of view external to it. An intellectualist concept of technology is the result of a bifurcated conception of life in humans. In addition, to the extent that its intervention targets the object pole, that is nature as the theatre and support of the vital processes, technology has an ambivalent relationship to care: certainly there is no care without technology, but the risk of a dissociation between performing cure and taking care is widening as technologies become technosciences.
I.4. From design of nature to care for “ordinary nature”
These three presuppositions thus constitute the unthought-of dimension of the two-layer model of care. However, in the light of the foregoing considerations, it appears more and more doubtful that this model can provide a satisfactory theoretical base for the idea of care for nature. The example of permaculture illustrates quite well the difficulty of transposing this model of care onto nature. Permaculturists12, however, explicitly put care for nature and for humans at the heart of their system of values. They claim to have a holistic conception of the human being, refusing to separate “the body, the affective and emotional sphere, the intellect, the spiritual13”. Therefore, they seem to exceed any bifurcated vision of care: care for the body is inseparable from care for the spirit, and care for human beings from care for the earth. “Care for the earth. Care for people. Fair share”: the motto of permaculture gestures toward a unitary vision of care, and toward a non-dual conception of human life. However, the continuum of care seems to be contradicted here by the prioritization of the concept of design. Permaculturists speak in fact of a real change of paradigm. Their analysis is as follows: historically, human groups have grown up in highly diverse habitats. This accumulated experience is a wealth of which permaculture intends to take advantage, drawing on traditional knowledges and know-how. On the whole, however, the growth of the human population on Earth was more like a fumbling adventure than a conscious plan. In place of this globally blind human expansion, the permaculturists intend to substitute a planned habitation, supported by specific knowledge relating to the environment and to the operation of living beings. It is now a matter of thinking of habitation from the viewpoint of design – to propose a “permacultural design”. However, if we can understand what permacultural design entails at the level of the farm or even of the territory, what becomes of this vocation of designer when the scale of intervention becomes the Earth itself (care for the Earth)? Must we admit that the human must become the chief designer of global nature? This would be a strange way to defend the idea of care for nature. It is hard to see in any case how we would escape the ambition of becoming masters and owners of nature. “How can one set oneself up as a designer of the world while acknowledging that one is subject to it?” asked Vilèm Flusser (Flusser 1999).
A dual conception of the human; an intellectualist conception of technology; the idea that some technologies are in essence contradictory to care (permaculturists ban mechanization as well as chemical inputs from their farms): permaculture remains well and truly dependent on the two-layer model of care and its assumptions, which leads to a difficulty in rendering robust the goal of care for nature or, in the terms of the permacultural philosophy, care for the earth.
In sum, Aliénor Bertrand sees clearly when she stresses how much the idea of taking care of nature risks surreptitiously returning to a dualistic anthropology – even that one which, in seeing humans as beings outside of nature due to their reason or their spirit, has led to the most predatory behaviors in respect of the natural world. The sincerity of permaculturalists is of course not in question here, and neither are the truly caregiving modalities of their relationships with the cultivated land. That being said, they seem to continue to conceive of the human according to a duality of perspectives, as living beings belonging to nature in their organism, but not in their technological intelligence. Humans belong to nature, but they remain designers of nature. They must simply create a better design for it.
How to get out of this impasse in order to better understand the conditions of a more caring technological action? For what should this action be caring, if not for nature taken globally? A possible answer comes from one current of environmental ethics, the ethics of so-called “ordinary” nature, whose diagnosis is almost that which we have just established: considering all of nature as an object of care, especially by giving it an intrinsic value, in no way leads to escaping from the dualism of the human being and nature; on the contrary, it leads to a hardening of this dualism because the human, despite the assertion that it remains a living being among living beings, appears engaged in a confrontation with nature which has nothing to do with the dialogue of the living being and its milieu. As emphasized by French philosopher Rémi Beau (2013), the shift of environmental ethics toward the concept of care for ordinary nature (i.e. to care, not for nature, but for natural things in our daily environment), could then allow us to dispense with the double conception of a human being which despite everything remains outside of nature, and of a nature without humans.
I.5. Technology, life and care
Let us summarize. The concept of the human as composed of body and spirit unified by care became closely linked to the two-layer model of care, as well as to an intellectualist conception of technology. In this theoretical framework, technological intelligence has a vocation to reconfigure the world – to design it. The only way in this case to guard against the excesses and ravages of technology is to impose upon it a limiting framework, but from outside: ethics seems to have today the function of providing this. Technology is in itself foreign to the values of caution and modesty inherent in care: the imperative of care must necessarily be imposed by an external and overhanging instance.
What however of the relationship between technology and care, once abandoned not only the dualistic conception of human life, but also the two-layer conception of care and the intellectualist conception of technology? As a matter of fact, the philosophical literature on care is almost completely silent on this subject. It still very often proceeds from an attitude of foreclosure in respect of technologies: here these are, so to speak, never questioned in their possible relationship to care, even if some philosophers of care, as we will see, are moving in some respects toward this questioning.
The intellectualist conception of technology seems to act, even today, as the common basis for debates on the relationship between care and technology – even though the non-intellectualist, rather vitalist, conception of technology as Organon, that is to say as an extension of a living body acting on its surrounding environment, remained unchanged overall over a very long historical period, ranging from the ancient Greeks (who had rigorously established this definition) until the century of the Enlightenment. In what conditions exactly, and why, did this transition occur? What have been the implications of this for the thought of technology, and for the conception we have of the relationship between humans and nature? We will attempt in this book to make a chronology, exactly, of the historical mutations that have led us to make technology a kind of “unthought-of” of care.
We will thus clarify what conception of technology, breaking with the intellectualist framework within which it still very often remains defined, can orient toward a more careful and caring attitude in respect of nature. What does it mean to think of technology otherwise than based upon intelligence, but as we will see, based upon life? Does this not lead to a counter-intuitive, even disturbing, conception of technology? Does a vitalist conception not mean in effect defending a purely and simply
