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The contribution of French biological philosophy of technology to the debate on technological mediation
(PRESENTED AT THE THEORIZING TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION
SYMPOSIUM, ORGANIZED BY P.-P. VERBEEK AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
TWENTE 17/11/16)

One of the major interests of the notion of technological mediation, as everybody here
knows, is to underline the importance of the relation between man and technology,
which leads to see technologies not only as an ensemble of material artefacts created by
someone with specific intentions, but also as agents which have functional activity and
often unforeseeable effects. Seeing technologies from a post-phenomenological approach
means to answer the question about HOW a certain object works, more precisely how it
mediates the relation between the human and world, and not only WHAT is a technical
object per se. In the jargon of the French philosophy of technology that I refer to, this
could be named an operational approach, because the attention is focused on the
technical operation, intended as a dynamic relation between three terms: the subject, the
technical object and the world.
The anthropologist Andr Leroi-Gourhan and the philosopher Gilbert Simondon
stressed this operational approach in the past century, and Xavier Guchet now uses it in
some very interesting ways. Today, I would like to show some contact points between
this approach and the post-phenomenological perspective on technological mediation,
because I think that both could take advantage from one another. I would like to put
particularly attention into the ethical dimension of the problem.
The most important characteristic in the French approach, I think, is that it is rooted in a
biological philosophy, whose major exponent is Henri Bergson. For Bergson, every
technic is an extension of a vital process; in his main book Creative Evolution, he writes
that life creates two sorts of organs: the natural ones, which are internal to the body, and
the artificial ones, which are externalised. In both cases, anyway, there is only the same
aim: to guarantee the insertion of the body in the environment, most precisely called the
milieu, in French. This position has two fundamental implications for an ethics of
technology, even if, until now, theyve not been enough investigated by scholars:
1) The first implication is that the poles of the technological relation are no longer
the man on one side and the world on the other, but the living and his milieu. In
this regard, when we talk about the ethical subject of technology, were not talking
about the citizen, or the person, or the Kantian moral subject, and not even about
the human being in general, but first of all were talking about the man as living
among other living beings, who lives in a milieu that is neither objectively related to
him nor objectively created by him, but which is more like a qualified

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environment with which he has a sort of debate (Goldstein). And this is a debate
about the conditions of life: the living asks the environment certain conditions of
life, and he modifies it in a technical way if he cant find the conditions he needs.
2) Secondly, it is thus possible to look at technology in a genetic way, because in this
perspective we look at technology as something that has a biological origin: every
tool is born to solve a problem arisen in the relation between the living and his
environment. Using a concept borrowed from Georges Canguilhem, we can say
that technology outcomes from the normativity of the living itself. This
perspective thus implies a normative priority of the living, and I think this is a very
important point to try to elaborate a critical ethics of technology and not only a
theory useful for describing technologies.

However, things are not so simple as they may appear at first glance, and even if we
admit that technic is an extension of life, the problem is that technical objects introduce a
normative dimension, which is very different from the vital one. Everybody knows that
there is a large number of technologies that can destroy life, as many others that present
great risks for life. We can say that in a genetic sense there is continuity between life and
technique, while in a normative sense there is discontinuity. The terms of this problem
were already understood by Bergson and pointed out in his latest book, The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion: if technologies are externalised organs, he argued, there is always the
risk of a disconnection between the mind on one hand, and the development of this
technical body on the other. Mechanization is for Bergson the most important
disconnection between technology and human mind in the history of life, it is the
moment when our externalised body has become too big compared to our mind, and we
have lost the moral control on it. The solution is for Bergson what he calls a supplement
of soul, useful to fill the gap between our possibilities and our understanding of them.
The role of philosophy is thus to fill this gap, to reflect about technology and to take over
our technical body, starting from the point of view of a biological philosophy of
technology.
Gilbert Simondon, about 50 years after Bergsons Creative Evolution, wrote an important
book, titled On the mode of existence of technical objects, (SLIDE 6) in which he links this
theoretical approach with a precise empirical analysis of technical objects, and particularly
of machines. He doesnt develop a real ethics of technology, but I think that he furnishes
us the empirical concepts and the theoretical framework to fulfil this task. In fact,
Simondon clarifies the idea of the technical mediation, and he says that technology is, in a
certain sense, what intervenes between the subject and the world to create this very
separation. Technology introduces mediation and distinction where before there was only
immediacy and continuity. This is what he writes:

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The technical object is the first detached object, since the world is a unity, a
milieu rather than a set of objects. In effect, there are three different realities: the
world, the subject and the object, mediator between the world and the subject.
The technical object is the first form assumed by the object. (MEOT, 170)

So, at the beginning, we must imagine life as whole in which there is no friction between
the subject and the milieu, but soon the subject needs to mediate this relation toward the
use of a technical object, in order to solve a problem of compatibility with the
environment. At this point, it is important to understand that this technical object is not a
mere instrument to realize human intention, but rather something that, thanks to his
specific materiality, can mediate the relation between the subject and the milieu in
unexpected ways. His normativity is thus radically distinct from the normativity of the
living, even if it finds its origin in it. Since the beginning, the evolution of technology
does not follow the intentions of men, but follows its internal rules of development. This
is why, as Andrea Bardin writes in his interesting book on Simondon,
the technical object actually evolves not when it adapts to the context and to the
goals it is produced for (this hypertelic functionality tends, on the contrary, to be
fatal), but rather when it institutes a dynamic relationship between two milieus, the
technical and the geographical (Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert
Simondon, 133)
In other words, technical normativity is radically autonomous from vital normativity and
thats why their articulation is an ethical problem for philosophy of technology. We have
a sort of paradox here: on the one hand, technology is seen as the result of the
normativity of the living; on the other hand, technical normativity is autonomous from it,
following its own rules of evolution.
I think that, in order to try to overcome this paradox, we should do two things: to reflect
on the articulation between vital normativity and technical normativity, and to separate the
concept of norm from that of normativity. The word normativity is to be intended here in
a very specific sense; its something that could remember the notion of agency, in a
certain way, but it is less personal and more linked to the material constitution of the
individual: we should talk about vital normativity if we deal with some biological
individual, and about technical normativity if we deal with any technical object. In fact, I
use this term in the way that has been clarified by Georges Canguilhem:
Normative, in philosophy, means every judgment which evaluates or qualifies a
fact in relation to a norm, but this mode of judgment is essentially subordinated to
that which establishes norms. Normative, in the fullest sense of the word, is that

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which establishes norms. And it is in this sense that we plan to talk about
biological normativity. (NP, 126-7)

So, if our judgments are based on norms, philosophy must understand the origin of these
norms, that which establishes norms. According to Canguilhem, this origin is not
rational, but first of all it is biological: vital normativity is the first source of normativity,
because vital norms are immanent to the organism and subjectively and immediately felt
by it. But, according to him, in addition to vital norms, humans also establish social
norms: these ones are transcendent, established by society and institutions. The greatest
difference between vital and social norms is that the firsts are to be observed if we want
to survive, while the latter are to be invented, because they are contingent, unnecessary,
arbitrary and conventional.
Completing Canguilhems analysis, Simondon coined the concept of technical
normativity, in order to describe a source of normativity which is not biological and not
human. So, lets see how Simondon intends the concept of technical normativity, and
lets try to understand how could we elaborate an ethics of technology based on the
triangulation between vital norms, social norms and technical norms.
Technical norms have, according to Simondon, a hybrid status between vital and social
ones: like the firsts, they are inherent to the individual (in this case, the technical
individual), but like the seconds, they are to be invented and so they can be changed.
Nevertheless, even if they are to be invented, technical norms are not simply
conventionally established, because they have a material existence and not only a
linguistic one. Thus, technical norms can be changed or modified within the limits of the
material structure of technology.
Thats the reason why Simondon believes that technical objects can constitute a powerful
vector of morality, because they can incorporate some implicit norms, which are
performed by the users in an unconscious way. People perform technical norms without
the need of a conscious and preliminary approval of them. For this reason, according to
Simondon, technical normativity is also the vector of moral evolution in society: if we
make the mental experiment of a community that has no contacts with other human
groups, we can imagine that its moral values have the tendency to keep the same along its
history: that is the typical close dynamic of what Simondon defines a community.
According to him, the only chance this closed community has to evolve into an open
society is by absorbing moral norms from the outside, and especially from technical
objects, which are the vectors of these norms. Obviously, this kind of moral change is
easier in a context of exchange with other groups, because the exchange of tools or
devices pushes society to adequate its norms to the new material context.

So, from the very perspective of a biological philosophy of technology, the problem of
the morality of technology can be put in the following terms: how to articulate the static
system of norms (biological, social and technical) with the dynamic of biological and
technical normativity? To better understand the terms of the problem, I would like to
borrow a very significant example often used by Peter-Paul Verbeek: that of the
contraceptive pill. We do know that, for some people, there is a norm that prevents
sexual relationships between same-sex people; at the same time, although someone can
think this norm is imposed by nature, we are aware that this is a social norm and not a
biological one: there is nothing like a natural law that prevents us from having a sexual
relationship with same-sex people. In this context of tension between a social norm and a
supposed natural norm, Verbeek analyses the moral role of a technical device as the
contraceptive pill: even if it has been created with the deliberate purpose to prevent
unwanted pregnancies, actually it also produces a non-designed effect, which is to lead us
to disable the mental connection between sex and reproduction. With the contraceptive
pill, we are so facing a case of technical normativity, that is to say a source of normativity,
which is neither biological nor social. This means not only that the technical device
embodies the norm, but also, more radically, that the norm is not even projected by any
human, because its created by the device itself, which is so normative in the fullest sense
of the word: it creates the norm. The norm is a pure effect of a technological
configuration, a moral effect exceeding the material and designed one. Actually, no one
had predicted any moral effect of this pill, no one had the intention to produce this
effect, but it was in some ways intrinsic in the technical structure of its functioning.
But now another problem arises: is it a good effect? Is it a bad one? How can we evaluate
it from the perspective of a mediation theory? Mediation theory just tells us that things
do really have morality and agency, but it seems to me that it needs to borrow values
from the outside, it needs the backing of an ethics. Can instead a biological philosophy of
technology help us to answer to these ethical questions from the inside of a theory of
technology?
According to Xavier Guchet (forthcoming, Springer 2016), the very interest of the
biological perspective is to integrate the mediation theory with a normative point of
view even if we must take here normative not in the classical sense, but in the sense
specified by Canguilhem. If we agree that the world is not simply a place where the
subject lives, but a milieu always already full of values and norms, and that technical
normativity is a way to transmit these values, to invent them and to mediatise the relation
between the living and the world, then we can understand the very sense of what Ive
called the normativity of the living. Being normative, in this sense, is not the faculty to
judge and to evaluate whether something is good or not in accordance to a given norm,
but it is to have a normative perspective from which we can look at the world from the
inside, from the middle. And the biological dimension here is nothing like an essence that

should not be violated, because we are aware that the living exists only in a technical
milieu, so theres nothing like a pure biological dimension. To adopt the perspective of
biological normativity doesnt mean to assert the legacy of an existing biological norm
against a technical one; it only means to assume the priority of the living over other
instances namely social and technical and, more generally, the priority of the normative
over the norm, as Canguilhem used to say. To use a metaphor, we can say that the
normative dimension of the living must be comprehended not as a map of the territory
of ethics, but as a compass to orient oneself in it. As Guchet writes:
There is no way to divide what counts as biological and what counts as social in
our organism. It does not mean that biology dissolves in society, and that the latter
delimits a new field that would be independent from biology: it rather means that
as a living being, man lives in a milieu where valences are non biological.
So to conclude quickly, I think that a biological philosophy of technology has much to
apprehend from a mediation theory of technology namely a strong theoretical
framework to think the normativity of things and technical objects but at the same time
it has also something to give specifically, as Guchet argues, a strong concept of value, a
biological perspective which can furnish an internal criterion to evaluate the morality of
technology.
Emanuele Clarizio