human being fulfils its nature as a living being in making a technician of itself. Technology repays its “debt to life”, to quote Simondon, by letting itself be guided by the goal of a fulfilment of life, that is to say of value-creating activity once we recognize the value of non-human living beings. Here he is particularly indebted to Dagognet, Simondon and Dewey.
The technological object gains an aesthetic dimension when it is no longer a detachable tool which is transportable everywhere, but a reality inserted into both the natural and human worlds, and when it gives rise to a sense of technological beauty.
The imperative of knowledge.
These practical principles do not allow us to determine in advance what is entailed by care in each situation. They are only regulatory, to employ Kant’s terminology. In effect a thought of care in technology is a matter of reflective judgement, and not of the faculty of determinant judgement.
He convincingly shows a large limitation in the ethics of care4. Intending to “care for nature” without taking the fight onto the ground of the design of technologies and of the technical organization of chains of production, is to fatally leave intact the distribution of the sensible which defines the social and political order of the moment; even worse, it is to let carelessness flourish, where production process is kept invisible.
Against very superficial conceptions of the idea of responsible innovation which do not question the ultimate goal of these policies and merely encourage and accelerate the passage of fundamental research toward industrial applications while ensuring in advance their “social acceptability”5, this book goes much further. If responsible innovation conceived in such a fuzzy manner does not guard against the creation of new vulnerabilities, and if the human remains outside nature, one may understand that some advocate surpassing this conception through an innovation which is oriented by care. Yet his critique, inspired by Dewey, in some way takes the opposite tack to this critique: the human is an instrument for the improvement of the natural world. Care thus consists of acting technologically in such a way that nature is fulfilled, improved, and optimized according to its own potentialities, and not by reference to the interests of a subjectivity cut off from the world.
Bernard REBER
December 2020
1 1 For a general overview see Sophie Pellé and Bernard Reber, From Ethical Review to Responsible Research and Innovation, ISTE and Wiley, 2016.
2 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.
3 3 In the series Responsible Research and Innovation see the book by Marc Maesschalck, Reflexive Governance for Research and Innovative Knowledge, ISTE and Wiley, 2017.
4 4 In a complementary way, see Sophie Pellé’s book, Business, Innovation and Responsibility, in which she interrogates conceptions of responsibility, available in the Responsible Research and Innovation set of books.
5 5 For a more economic critique of this failing see Nikolova Blagovesta, The RRI Challenge. Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, ISTE and Wiley, 2019.
Introduction
Humanity by itself creates much devastation. A highly technologized humanity, intelligently technologized through a network, which has a geographical sense, is much less dangerous for nature than humanity by itself.
Gilbert SIMONDON
A nagging question haunts our era: can we yet avoid the major ecological disruptions that more than two centuries of industrialization based on fossil energies seem to have rendered inevitable? It is in fact more and more widely recognized that these disruptions, which there is every reason to believe will have disastrous consequences for all of life on Earth (including humans), will occur no matter what we do today to prevent them. We may, at best, limit their magnitude somewhat, provided however that the major industrialized countries take drastic measures without delay – which seems unfortunately not to be the most probable option as evidenced by the tepidity of the (at best, modest) advances made by the international conferences on the environment that have been held for many years.
Should we consider the question as definitively closed, and think that our technological choices have completely committed us on an irreversible path to planetary ecological disaster? Must we even go as far as to consider, with François Jullien for example (Jullien 2004), that the technological relationship with the world as it has been conceived and developed in the western world, and whose model we have inherited from the ancient Greeks, is essentially the expression of a will to mastery of nature, the outcome of which, to the extent that our technological activity acquires more and more powerful means of action, could only be the predicted disaster which we must face today?
This book aims to answer these questions in the negative, showing on the contrary that the western conception of technology is historically articulated with a genuine requirement of care for things and beings. It is true that with the Industrial Revolution, this requirement seems to have deserted our technological action. The latter seems since then to have been controlled only by the power of calculation (metron) and seems no longer subject to what should have yet remained the guiding principle of all technological activity: the faculty of metrion, that is to say of fair measure, of suitability and of care – which faculty precisely cannot be reduced to the rationality of calculation. How have we come to so radically dissociate technology from care, metron from metrion – and especially, how to reintroduce metrion, correctness and care, into our technological activity? Can we reforge the frayed links between technology and care?
I.1. Care for nature
The need to develop technologies which are more “respectful of nature” is very widely shared among the general public but also among engineers and designers, who consider themselves more and more concerned by environmental issues (especially in the case of students who, notably in France, have over the last few years developed a growing awareness of their present and future responsibility in the matter1). The effort to introduce the aim of protecting nature into the activities of engineering and technological design has in fact a long history. The concepts of green design, eco-design or sustainable design also show a significant change in the openness of technological design to ecological issues in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting more exactly the fact that this openness has gone hand in hand with an increasingly radical and comprehensive understanding of the responsibility of engineers and designers in ecological matters (Madge 1997).
The links between technological design and ecological thinking are older still. Thus, some of the great figures of the Bauhaus such as Walter Gropius (its founder) or László Moholy-Nagy in the 1930s had already forged contacts with representatives of the ecological sciences in London, where they had emigrated following the closure of their school in Germany by the Nazis (Anker 2010). The reflection on design integrated ecological questions very early on.
The current context is marked by the success of a new mobilizing watchword, which is currently bringing together a growing number of initiatives intended to get the industrialized countries to adopt a less destructive relationship to nature. This watchword is expressed in terms of a fairly simple imperative: we must take care of nature. The expression “take care of nature and of people [may indeed appear as] a new watchword of late modernity. It responds to a social crisis [as well as] an environmental crisis”
