The interdisciplinary animal

From Firenze University Press Journal: TECHNE

Maurizio Ferraris, Università di Torino, Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione

Humans are not always asked to save themselves. Not too many centuries ago, this task was given to God, and the bill would be paid in the afterlife, without damaging the environment. Now it is not this way. Humans are responsible for what happens, for better or for worse, and there is rarely good news: ecologi-cal or economic crisis, wars, and pan-demics. At the same time, humans are engaged in continuous processes of re-definition involving rights, gender, and society, considering themselves more as an open project in progress than as the execution of a transcendent mandate.A highly organised society, such as that of the termites, will never be ex-posed to face global challenges, while humans are always obsessed, not wrongly, by the end of the world, the Apocalypse, and dies irae. Over time these worries turn into challenges, that is into problems to be solved, with the growth — at least as a principle — of the hope placed in technology, history, and humanity; to the point of start-ing a slightly misleading rhetoric of the challenge, as nobody can say chal-lenges must be won. This does not mean that challenges cannot be won; being engaged in a challenge is better than trusting in fatalism, according to which Heidegger declared only a God can save us now, with a nihilism that was the low continuum of the XX century philosophy. Fortunately, it is not the essential pas-sion of the philosophy of our century anymore. It is immersed in a deeply different, more prepositive spiritual atmosphere, above all because global challenges need interdisciplinary an-swers, and here philosophy is needed, not as the queen of the sciences (other times …), but according to the famous Umberto Eco’s statement as poly-maths, that is the skill to link appar-ently unrelated points. There is no choice because if there is something I won’t rely on, it would be our salvation from God, who, in case He exists, has got better things to do than caring for one of the endless spe-cies living and dying in a dispersed part of the universe. I won’t trust even if salvation depended on a particular science like medicine or economics; the result would be that we would all be either healthy and poor or sick and rich, in the best hypothesis. It is not a case that ecology is a typically trans-versal knowledge, but not enough, as the slogan “let’s save our planet” shows (why not the universe, while we are at it?). Here philosophy could suggest the point consists in guaranteeing a socially and ecologically friendly environment with human life forms and other life forms consistent with it (for instance, I won’t be too good with viruses, estab-lished that they are alive). Here global challenges are opened that are quite naturally interdisciplinary challenges. Why us?Legitimately we can ask why these challenges happen just to us, but the reason is too obvious. Organisms evolve in their natural history thanks to selection, so in a very slow way.But the organism systematically con-nected to mechanisms like the human being also evolves through a techno-logical way, that is in a faster way, with what is shown as a historical exist-ence (and which obviously produces cultural shocks that do not happen in nature). The speed of the transforma-tion, as we said, generates forms of fear towards a process and a progress that seem to be too fast when compared to human adaptability.This is certainly an experience that does not concern animals. If we saw a lion dating back to two thousand years ago, I imagine it would not be very different from a contemporary lion; while if, for some reason, we met a human being dating back to two thousand years ago, he would appear very different from us, in attire, in managing, in the language he speaks, in his values and cultural ref-erences. In other words, we will never find a crocodile complaining that it cannot understand younger genera-tions, although crocodiles can be very long-lived and can observe the alterna-tion of many generations. The inter-generational shock, as well as the shock due to the technological evolution that is often the basis of the social evolution, requires a speed that is accessible only to those who can capitalise on the past explicitly through writing, that is acces-sible exactly to humans.From this point of view, do not forget that fear of technology very often result in the naturalisation of an immediately previous technology. Most of the objec-tions raised today against the Web were raised against television thirty or forty years ago, which now appears, instead, a quite innocent and reassuring instru-ment. I think it is easy to imagine the scene of a parent telling his/her child “Stop getting foolish before your mo-bile phone, let’s watch some television”.Otherwise, think about Heidegger’s singular issue, according to which typewriting would betray the purity of thought due to its excessive depend-ence on technical mediation. What is interesting is that Heidegger considers handwriting something natural and, therefore, in accordance with the deep needs of the thought: which is a tech-nique learnt with effort together with so many other techniques that deter-mine us as human beings.Do not forget that it was precisely on handwriting, that is, on the perfect expression of thought according to Heidegger, that Plato’s criticisms were noted against writing — and obviously they talked about handwriting — as it would be a thought corrupter. They are the culture shocks which, unlike those of nature, affect only human animals, not all organisms. What seems particularly interesting today is that mechanisms, automata, large or small machines surrounding us do not even affect us, as technological shocks affect the sense of existence.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/techne-14629

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