Anthropogenesis and Technopathy

Abstract

The first part of this paper takes as its starting premise the existence of what was defined by Max Scheler at the start of the 20th century as the coincidence between the psychic and the living (The Human Place in the Cosmos, 1927). The establishment of this coincidence allows us to form a conception of the “psychicity (Psychizität) of life,” i.e. to form a provisional definition of consciousness as manifest expression that both has its roots and extends its highest branches in the evolutive dimension of “the affective”, coming eventually to assume the form and mode particular to “higher-order consciousness”. This higher-order consciousness likely represents the highest level, or the most complex and interconnected level, of the totality of existing manifestations of the vital, understood as the totality of the vital as affectivity, and is today the subject of empirical investigation in the field of the philosophy of neuroscience, a line of inquiry that was anticipated in particular (though not exclusively) by the late 19th and early 20th century philosophical anthropologies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler and Viktor von Weizsäcker. The second part of this article, Technopathy, looks at the modern-day pathological “neo-development” of the self, viewed as a progressive distancing of the self from its vital plane, i.e. from the affective. This distancing is generated by an insatiable craving for cognitive consciousness (calculating/quantitative), “animated” by the only passion that it seems to have retained: the passion for technology. Such distancing is pathological in the sense that it results in the regression and erosion of the “animal” passions and affects expressed by the living body, leading potentially to their total eradication. This trend poses a serious threat to the future of humanity.