at the end of the 1980s (Goffi 1988) that it had always gathered, since Plato, three inseparable dimensions: a phenomenological or ontological dimension, consisting of a description of technical reality through its various manifestations (tools, instruments, machines, gestures, practices, operations, etc.); an anthropological dimension signaling towards the idea that every technique finds its true raison d’être and its ultimate meaning in the necessity of satisfying vital needs; and finally an evaluative dimension. What characterizes contemporary philosophies, Goffi wrote at the time, is a relative fragmentation of this approach. Evaluative, anthropological and ontological approaches are often dissociated: few are the unitary philosophies of technology (Goffi 1988, 52-53). According to Goffi, this situation could be explained by the gradual rise in importance of the evaluative perspective, which has pushed the other two dimensions into the background. The current philosophy of technical artefacts, to which we shall return later, undeniably strives to overcome this imbalance and to regain a unitary conception of the technical fact, by integrating the ontological and evaluative dimensions to a greater extent. However, the anthropological dimension remains to this day the poor relation of philosophical analyses of contemporary technology. The present work is intended to fill this gap. In sum, this book is a book of philosophy of technology, the objective of which is to respond to the following questions: in what sense can we speak of “care in technology”? For there to be care, is it not necessary for there to be a subject to dispense care? According to what concept of care then can we speak of technologies able to perform care by virtue of their very design, if that is indeed what we mean? What meaning can be given to the concept that seems to emerge here, and which seems at best self-contradictory, at worst devoid of meaning: that of an objectified care, reified in technology – that is to say of a care which no longer operates through the activity of a subject who provides care?
One might object to the great naivety of this exercise, or even to its profound ignorance of the real mechanisms that have historically led to the depredation of nature. Can we really believe, we might say for example, that it is due to the persistence of a dualistic anthropology and a two-layer model of care that plastic waste accumulates in hundreds of thousands of tons in the oceans (Eriksen et al. 2014), thus forming what we might call a new continent – a continent of waste? Behind this phenomenon, and many others of the same kind, lie not anthropological or philosophical postulates, but quite certainly actors, including industrial ones, who have taken decisions based on their interests. French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou (2019) has recently highlighted the role of brewery and soft-drink industrialists of as early as the 1930s, in the United States, in promoting disposable cans and bottles which came to replace the old system of recoverable and reusable containers (a system based on deposits). The industrial lobbies have worked very well and they certainly have a role in the explosion of astronomical quantities of waste which must now, in fact, be recycled. Let us cease to beat about the bush and point the finger directly at the problem – not in the heaven of philosophical ideas about humanity and about care, but in the strategies of the major industrial players.
This objection is unstoppable, and it must be clear: no miracle recipe will come out of these analyses and, of course, it is above all through struggles and the efforts of regulation that things will change. Bergson warned us: a more frugal mode of life, one therefore less detrimental to nature, would have to go through a very deep moral reform. However, such a reform being apparently unattainable, “we must be content with shifts and submit to more and more numerous and vexatious regulations” (Bergson 1935, p. 274).
There is always an aspect of our daily lives by which, whatever our goodwill and our sincerity, we produce a defect of care. Manufacturing and using a smartphone or a computer, taking a plane trip, turning on electricity inevitably involves a defect of care, since these technological objects or gestures depend upon industrial clusters which are deleterious to natural environments and humans that are sometimes very distant from us. There is no loophole, even if otherwise we promote low tech philosophy or agriculture without chemical inputs. We have built our habitation of the world upon the (de)predation of nature; we can without doubt be less (de)predatory, but we can hardly stop being so altogether. But this thought must not discourage us. It in no way prevents us from defining the theoretical conditions and practical principles of caring technological action, to implement as much of it as possible in the aim of reducing the (de)predation exerted upon nature and upon living beings in general. This book has no other ambition than to indicate what these conditions and principles are.
1 1 See for example the “Student Manifesto for an Ecological Awakening” in French, https://pour-un-reveil-ecologique.org/fr/ (accessed February 4, 2020).
2 2 Incidentally, it is not altogether new that human relationships to nature, in industrial societies, should be envisaged by the standard of care, as evidenced for example by the curricula of education on nature in the elementary schools of Western Europe, which have combined at least two ways to teach nature to children throughout the past century: although the scientific and instrumental conception of nature has massively infused the curricula of secondary education, in contrast the primary schools have never really abandoned leading children, by observation, to create an experience and a conception of nature oriented by caring concerns (Postma 2006, p. 3).
3 3 Catherine Larrère thus emphasizes the existence of an incompatibility between, on the one side, the environmental ethics which proclaim the concepts of intrinsic value and wild nature (wilderness), still dominant on the North American continent, and on the other side the ethics of care for nature (Larrère 2012).
4 4 ”The theme of care allows a pragmatist and particularist treatment of environmental issues, beyond the major principles and incentives to moralise or to (un)assign guilt” (Pelluchon 2019a, p. 14).
5 5 Pierron J.-P. 2019, pp. 104–105, citing F. Worms.
6 6 Hess cited by Pierron (Pierron 2013c).
7 7 It should be noted however that anthropocentrism does not necessarily imply a predatory attitude in respect to nature. “Weak” anthropocentrism may only assign to nature an instrumental value, without justifying its exploitation: this value may be aesthetic, cognitive, etc., which requires a protective rather than destructive attitude.
8 8 And not only by them, by the way; many other philosophies have established this link, including those of the ancient Greeks, as we will see.
9 9 The reading that Warren T. Reich proposes of Hygin’s fable certainly emphasizes the existence of a tension in care – tension between care as a burden and care as solicitude. By its physical and telluric nature, care is a load, a burden; by its spiritual nature, it is solicitude. This reading, however, does not affect the unity of care; it does not mean that there is not one but two cares; there is a single care. However, any care implies this internal tension (Reich 1995).
10 10 One of the Chinese states of the so-called Spring and Autumn period.
11 11 The concept of the intrinsic value of nature, as well as its relationship to care for nature, will be discussed later.
12 12 Permaculture is a method of agriculture theorized in the 1970s by the Australians Bill Molisson and David Holmgren. The initial motivation of Molisson and Holmgren was to propose an alternative to intensive agriculture, in which the search for higher yields by the massive artificialization of environments has resulted in the exhaustion of microbiological life present in the soil and, eventually, the sometimes dramatic decline of their fertility. The services that are normally rendered by these microorganisms (degradation of the bedrock to create humus, input material nitrogen, etc.) have thus had to be substituted by other means, including by the provision of chemical inputs. In contrast to these artificializing industrialist approaches, permaculture proposes to return to bio-inspired agricultural practices, capable of taking advantage of natural functions. Nature has in effect given birth over the long term to ecosystems that are extremely complex and robust, based on the existence of multi-level relations of interdependence between many elements, mineral as well as organic: a permacultural farm aims to reproduce this complex network of elements in interaction at all orders of magnitude. See e.g. (Hervé-Gruyer 2018).
13 13 See the website of the Bec Hellouin permacultural farm –