The tick, the gods and the contract

Abstract

The question that this paper will address is that of the human being’s relationship to technology and nature. The main argument considers how the human being is “world-forming” as opposed to the animal being “poor in world” (Heidegger). The investigation into the question of the human being’s symbiosis with nature and technology will be explored mainly through the work of Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Bernard Stiegler. Heidegger and Agamben will assist in elucidating the difference between the animal’s open and the human’s unconcealment in order for the argument to be made that the animal and the human navigate their world by way of a succession of marks. The animal’s marks are already given while the human constructs its marks. The myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, as retold by Stiegler, will serve to show how the “human is technics”. Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis offers a view of the human as Weltbildend that takes further Heidegger’s assertion that “[t]echnē is a mode of alētheuein [revealing]” (Heidegger 2011: 222). Through seeing the human as technics, Stiegler offers a view of technology that does not fall into the traditional parameters of technological or cultural determinism on the one side, or technological substantivism and instrumentalism on the other. Stiegler’s view of epiphylogenesis will lead to a discussion of what Michel Serres calls The natural contract (1995) in order to propose conceptualisation of the symbiotic connection of animal/human/technē. Current policies like carbon-emission taxes seek short-term alleviation of ecological problems, still considering the human as being in a relationship with nature. Serres’ natural contract will be proposed as a way to think of nature as part of the social contract. Such a re-thinking of nature’s position can only be thought of as a symbiosis.