12. Homo faber
Since the last time I denounced the pervasiveness in the Occident of logocentrism, I would now like to say something of Homo faber, of the way in which man structures his activity exactly like he structures his representation (perception) to make a sign of it. To tell the truth the processes of verbal rationality and technical rationality are perfectly analogical. What is an analogy? To shed light on the matter I will borrow an image drawn from geometry: two images (for example two triangles) that are super-imposable, without being identical (think of tracing paper!). I thus have two perfectly autonomous triangles, perfectly dissociable. Here, it should be understood that dialectical technical abstraction is in all ways super-imposable with the dialectic of verbal abstraction, without merging with it. What allows us to dissociate the two? The private clinic, quite simply, which teaches us that there exist aphasics who have technical rationality and of people who handle the verb marvellously well, while not having any technical capability. This development being made, I come to a quick examination of the model of technical rationality.
Man, like the animal, is able to deal naturally with his activities, but this natural treatment does not help man achieve the technique. If man arrives at thought, it is because he is able to verbalise its representation, if the man emerges with technique (whereas the animal is not a technician), it is because man is able to structure his activities culturally, activity of which the methods can be perceived.
The action is done thanks to motivity and operation (which are completely analogical to sensoriality and perception). Paralysis, as we know it, can be considered as an attack on the motivity and apraxias, attacks on the operational system: with those who suffer from apraxia, everything functions, but in a disordered way, the gestures being reduced to involuntary movements. Lastly, when we speak about the imaginary (in the Sartrien sense of the term), in connection with natural treatment of representation (the symbolic functions that we share with animals), we speak about instinct being of the natural treatment activity. It should be understood that what one calls instinct supposes the instrumental capacity to link ways (and not objects, as in the symbolic function system) and finally, gestures. It is what explains why a monkey uses a wooden stick to get a banana or a stone to break nuts; therefore, the connection of the means to the end is accessible to the animal. Thus is explained the animal instinct, and the apparent complexity of its activities, in particular those of the weakest animals in which the mechanisms are all at the entirely physiological level: it follows that, for them, there is no real invention.
Man, is able not only to link, like an animal, the means to the end, but to structure instruments (of which it shares this capacity with animals), to make a tool. Watch carefully that this word is not used in the plural (no more than the words for sign, person or standard): we are not in the hardware business here! The tool is never pluralized, because the tool indicates the structural capacity which we have to analyze and the means to an end. When we have to put a sign in the plural, we speak about words; when we have to put tools in the plural, we speak about tools or elements of tools: utensils.
With utensils, you have at the same time its name and its directions for use. This way, a saw, is not simply iron and wood (or plastic). It is that, but the iron and wood are structured in such a way that the unit corresponds to a certain task. In other words, it is exactly as with the pharmaceutical tools: there is the chemical composition (the drug itself) and the dosage (directions for use). One should understand that all tools comprise one and the other necessarily. It is in fact fairly complicated, because it is so terribly abstract: when a chimpanzee comes across a medicine, it will never occur to him that this medicine is used to heal! Just as if it finds a pair of glasses, never will it occur to him that these glasses are used to see clearly (it will place them on its head perhaps, but only if it saw you doing it). And if the same chimpanzee falls on a hammer, this hammer will be to him, an object, but for us it is at the same time an object of iron and wood as well as a tool used to strike. In short, just as the drug is a thing “to look after”, the pair of glasses is a thing “to see”, the hammer, a thing “to strike”, the saw a thing “to saw”, etc… Consequently, if somebody hands you a saw, you will not take it by the blade! Hand it to a monkey or an atechnic person, both will take it by any end. In other words, for the atechnic person as for the monkey, there is an object, a “thing”, without any program. It is very similar to what occurs in the aphasic: an aphasic has some words which they cannot understand what to do with, what encumbers them, they employ in a disordered way, since they cannot adapt them. In a word, the apraxia is not the atechnic, which supposes the analysis of the means and end.
The analysis of the means leads to transforming the matter into material. Take copper, for example, I mean pure copper: it can be used to create various materials, according to the way it is used (material and directions for use are you see in-dissociable). The matter (what it is) becomes material only by the possible use (directions for use). Under these conditions the matter copper can be used as a material because of its capacities for heat (to manufacture pans), vibration (to manufacture trumpets), conduction (to manufacture electric wires), etc… In other words, the same material can be used for several possible elements of tools. Here we see the degree of abstraction that is necessary to achieve!!
Also, so that this “to make” that is the tool (as the sign is a “to say”) is really one, it is necessary that the tool, to transform the world, is applied to something: it does not form a part any more, here, of manufacture, but of production (in a way which has nothing to do with the Marxist production, which is purely socio-economic). The production is defined as the process which, reinvesting the tool in the world, transforms it, the product, i.e., makes of the universe our work. And just as, by being manufactured the same matter can be transformed into several materials, so with the production, the same end can appear to be different. To move us, we have our legs, the horse, the bicycle, the car, etc… This way, you see that the tool is at the same time manufacture and production.
I will not push this model further from technical rationality, because you certainly already understood that it is absolutely ridiculous to favour the logos: the tropos (dexterity) is as abstract as the logos, but on another level to that of the logos. Actually, the operation (or handling) is as abstract as the reasoning. You know that, if the abstraction is one, it is diffracted on the four plans of rationality which the clinical makes it possible to isolate.
But, if you accept – which even the philosophers have never disputed – that reason is one, it is quite obvious that Homo faber emerged at the same time as the verbal abstraction, i.e. with language, logos, thought. Homo faber and Homo sapiens, they are the same man. It is therefore nonsense to try and place them in an evolutionary order. In other words, when you find, near a frozen skeleton, a small cut flint end, a small piece of clothing, etc, you can be sure that the man whose bones are before your eyes, not only spoke, but argued like you and me (and I will add, the reason being one, that this man had emerged with social and moral rationality). In short, it is only in the head of misplaced palaeontologists like Leroi-Gourhan and a few rare others even today, that Homo faber preceded Homo sapiens (or Homo socius and Homo ethicus). And what’s to say about this recent invention of Homo erectus of which it is said was born some four hundred and fifty thousand years ago and had domesticated fire? If the domestication of fire is a technical operation, which is hardly contestable either, it is obvious that this Homo erectus necessarily had to be at the same time as faber and sapiens, or it was not Homo!
All in all, one can have fun to going way back into the past as far as one wants, even to father Adam, Homo is Homo or he is not. Before man, it was not man, man did not witness his own birth: father Adam is each one of us when we came into the world (for this reason, it should be considered that the concept of “hominisation” is completely fraudulent). You see, once more, the vanity of the pseudo explanations by the origin which flourishes still today insofar as, at this beginning of third millennium, we are still the victims of the historicism of the XIX century. This is what it is absolutely necessary to get rid of in order to elaborate a scientific model of man, and, in particular a scientific model of a technical rationality which, like verbal rationality, is beyond time.
It is certain that we will arrive there only at the price of an immense effort, we have epistemological obstacles to surmount! You must understand, we have to get rid of our historicism, and our logocentrism.
Acting from historicism, from which I was just referring to, the effort to be made is relatively easy, insofar as it dates only from the XIX century. We will undoubtedly not have too much trouble to understand that, technically, the hand of Homo faber was exactly the same as ours, it was as “intelligent” as ours, what we have in common Homo faber and us is that we have a hand, not a paw, neither more, nor less.
Acting from logocentrism the effort that we have to make is absolutely colossal, because of this logocentrism about which I spoke, and which comes to us from so far. I will simply add, here that, for a French person, the effort will need to be redoubled, because it is a question of passing from “I think, therefore I am” Cartesian (which is nothing but absolute folly), to “I make, therefore I am” (which is nothing but counter-folly)! It is, in the order of what the philosophers call the episteme, more than a revolution: a true change!
That is the essence of what I wanted to say on this subject. But before leaving, allow me to supplement, in the light of these reflexions, what I said to you of Art, in “the imposture of aesthetics”, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what I said to you on the writing of the concept.
Proceeding from Art, the plan on which it is defined is, of course, the plan of technical rationality. But, perhaps you may think, if the hammer is a thing “to strike”, the car a thing “to convey”, etc, Art is a thing “to what”? Here there is something that has been much sniffed at: it is about the relationship between Art and play. But all the studies relating to the subject are in vain because, quite simply, no definition of play can be found. Play is like a language: everyone knows what it is. After that, there is nothing else to do but draw the scale! It is as if you say: “Man, I know well what that is since I am one!” For lack of definition some pushed stupidity up to the invention of Homo ludens! Without going into this nonsense, the majority of the treaties on the concept of Art say that it is a “play activity” defined as a “needless activity”. But it is obvious that play corresponds to a need, even if it is only the need to distract oneself. Moreover, the definition of Art as “a needless activity” is not far from the philosophical definition of Beautiful: “Beautiful is an ending without end”, because when these philosophers speak about “end”, they do not distinguish between the goal and the need. It is this same confusion which is expressed in the distinction of “the useful and the pleasant”, which is a way of saying that the apples of Cézanne are not to be crunched upon. You understand the naive opposition, but one which always lives in the organization even of our studies, between the “Art schools” and the “Art-and-Trades”: it is the opposition of the artist and the craftsman (although the artist is only one particular type of craftsman). In the mentality which results from our Renaissance is the artist that does something which is used for nothing… Fine. I’ll stop the catalogue of ineptitudes here. Let us remain serious. How to define play?
If one considers the whole of life, one notes the difference of plant, animal, because it is equipped with a corporeality, in old Greek of a “sôma ” (word which indicates an animated being, either man or animal), reaches a kind of autonomy, or “auto-kinesis” of life, which means that it is never completely dependent on its environment: it can have representations without stimuli (dreams, for example), of agitations without reason, wants without need (or whims) etc… It is not for this that one can speak about “games” in animals, quite simply because the game supposes emergence with the rational: there is always, with humans, what one calls the “rules of the game”. Thus, the play is the auto-kinesis of rational, i.e. this particular characteristic of rational which makes it function spontaneously, without dependence on the medium and of its urgency. So it should be considered that, even when man works, he sculpts, he thinks or does mathematics, man does not cease playing (you see, here again, it should be said in passing, the immense illusion that consists in bringing play back to the child).
We are capable, from now on, to complete the definition of Art that I proposed a while ago: art is the auto-kinesis of technical rationality, when this technical rationality favours the endocentric aim of the industrial reinvestment. This definition enables you to seize, in particular, that the artist is quite simply a specialized craftsman. In other words, genius does not exist, or it should be said that genius is five percent aptitude and ninety five percent work. Moreover, the definition that I propose, from now on, has the advantage of not using the language, nor the history, in other words it removes us from the logocentrism and the historicism.
Going from there to now writing the concept, we have seen that when it was about the mythical concept, this writing was more especially related to memory (memory of the people or memory of the individuals). But when it is about the scientific concept of mathematics, for example, one cannot speak any more about filing. Why? Quite simply because, in the case of mathematics, the writing is programmed, it is a formal model which imposes its coherence and its logic. In this case the writing is minimal, if you want to control a Boeing: you don’t worry about going any more, your attention is directed on the instrument panel, i.e. it is moved from the economic target to a programmed course. The voyage is reduced, for you, to a “checklist”. In mathematical writing, it is the number, the algebraic symbol or the diagram that can be considered the equivalent of the “checklist” carried out by the pilot. I would say that mathematics, is the passage in extreme cases of a writing that is exclusively programmable. But, and here is the paradox, this type of writing makes us feel stronger than if we count on our ten fingers. While exempting us from thought, writing produces thought, i.e. it is thought without thinking, to some extent, or of “cogitatio caeca” (of “blind thought”), as Leibniz said, who came, as you know, after Pascal, the inventor of the calculating machine). But, after all, the paradox is found in all areas of technology: just as the car, while exempting us from walking, makes us go more quickly, in the same way, by resting our mind, the writing makes us think more strongly. Nothing extraordinary! Think of musical writing. Do you think that Mozart could have existed without the invention, near the XIII century, of musical writing?
However, any writing is, in general, at the same time memory (technicalised) and programmes (or “captions”, as I said), so that it is a colossal error to bind the writing just to the memory, like almost everyone does. Actually, any writing, any language either naturally appearing (the voice, dance), or culturally (the goose feather, the computer) is as much, if not more, programme than memory. It is a fact that you have almost certainly noted: insofar as there is no thought without language, the apparel of the language presents this particular aspect to make us think differently, and, especially, more effectively: it is particularly manifest in the technicalisation of language by the tool. One can say, in this case that the writing overpowered our memory and, especially, our creativity. You see, since the computer, which does not think, as we saw, but which is memory and also program, produces thought with an incredible effectiveness.
If you want, we can consider that this tool which is the goose feather is to this natural instrument, our training “apparatus”, what, in the order of displacement, the car is to our legs. In a way, the computer, itself, is to the goose feather, what the space rocket is to the car! A fortiori, you see which fantastic variations in the effectiveness there can be between the computer and our training “apparatus”: it is exactly the same variation as that which exists, in the order of displacement, between the space rocket and our legs! Under these conditions, hurray for the computer which, tomorrow, while exempting us to think, paradoxically, will make us think with a marvellous effectiveness, and perhaps even allow us to abandon our current writing!
This day (which is not very distant, you can be sure!) will regulate definitively the problem of illiteracy, at least this form of illiteracy which we have known since the invention of printing. Yes! We are changing the galaxy: the illiteracy of tomorrow will not have anything any more to do with ours. This is why one should not worry too much about the illiteracy which prevails today, at least in France.