/lit/ - Literature

>Toward the conclusion of his essay, referring to the necessary confrontation between techne and dike, Boehme raises two very intriguing questions:

>Could philosophy not forget Being, and simply concentrate all of its efforts on attaining the highest perfection of its technics? Or else, ultimately, is there any possibility that thinking could release itself from its attachment to a technical condition?

>We can identify Boehme’s two questions with two forms of thinking which today confront modernity: one seeks to overcome the impasse of philosophy analysed by Heidegger through a new conceptualization of technology, as is the case in Stiegler; the other tends to retreat into a ‘philosophy of nature’, whether Whiteheadian or Simondonian— to submit techne to nature— namely, to surrender to the overwhelming, or Gaia. We have already touched on the limits of this second approach in the Introduction: Chinese philosophers such as Mou Zongsan, and Sinologists such as Joseph Needham, have already discovered the affinity between Whiteheadian and Chinese philosophy; but if we are to admit that a return to the Whiteheadian concept of can help us to escape the impasse of modernity, then would a return to the Chinese traditional philosophy also afford such an escape route?

>Maybe we should ask the same of indigeneous ontologies: Are they then able to confront technological modernity? Our task here is to show that this is not sufficient. In the case of China, the Qi-Dao unity has been completely shattered. Although one may wish to argue that because of the formidable political factors in play, we cannot give an absolute or negative answer to this question, our philosophical analysis in Part 1 concerning the breakdown of the Qi-Dao relation, and our analysis above of the geometry-time-technics relation in China in comparison to Europe, have aimed to show that this is not only a socio-political question, but fundamentally an ontological one. Those who propose a return to nature or to cosmologies alone seem to have gracefully elided the failures of the project of ‘overcoming modernity’ in the twentieth century.

>Even today, if we are to take up Heidegger’s and Stiegler’s critiques, we risk accepting a universal history of technology and a cosmopolitanism without world history. This risk is reflected in current thinking on the opposition between global and local. In such an opposition, the local is seen as a form of resistance against the global; yet the discourse of the local is itself the product of globalisation.