/lit/ - Literature

>Philosophy is not the language of blind causal necessity, but rather that which at once allows the latter to be spoken, and goes beyond it. The dialectical movement between rationality and myth constitutes the dynamic of philosophy, without which there would be only positive sciences. The Romantics and German Idealists, writing toward the end of the eighteenth century, were aware of this problematic relationship between philosophy and myth. Thus we read in The Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism — published anonymously in 1797, but whose authors are suspected to be, or at least to be associated with, the three friends from the Tubingen Stift, Holderlin, Hegel, and Schelling— that ‘mythology must become philosophical, and the people rational, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophers sensuous. Then eternal unity reigns among us.’

>Not coincidentally, this insight came at a moment of renewal of philosophical interest in Greek tragedy, chiefly through the works of these three highly influential friends. The implication here is that, in Europe, philosophy’s attempt to separate itself from mythology is precisely conditioned by mythology, meaning that mythology reveals the germinal form of such a mode of philosophising. Every demythologisation is accompanied by a remythologisation, since philosophy is conditioned by an origin from which it can never fully detach itself.

>Accordingly, in order to interrogate what is at stake in the question of technology, we should turn to the predominant myths of the origins of technology that have been handed down to us, and at once rejected and extended by Western philosophy. The misconception that technics can be considered as some kind of universal remains a huge obstacle to understanding the global technological condition in general, and in particular the challenge it poses to non-European cultures. Without an understanding of this question, we will all remain at a loss, overwhelmed by the homogeneous becoming of modern technology.

>Allow me to pose this question in the form of a Kantian antinomy: Technics is anthropologically universal, and since it consists in the extension of somatic functions and the externalisation of memory, the differences produced in different cultures can be explained according to the degree to which factual circumstances inflect the technical tendency; Technics is not anthropologically universal; technologies in different cultures are affected by the cosmological understandings of these cultures, and have autonomy only within a certain cosmological setting— technics is always cosmotechnics. The search for a resolution of this antinomy will be the Ariadne’s thread of our inquiry.

“Every demythologization is accompanied by a remythologization...”