Responsiveness and Technology

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)I. Technical ResponsivenessLet me begin with the notion of'technical responsiveness' and pose two ob- vious questions to unravel it: What is responsiveness? How is it technical? To the first question we will seek an answer in a phenomenology of touch taking its point of departure in Aristotle's De Anima. In this treatise on the soul-or on life, as we should perhaps say today in order to avoid certain assumptions we have come to think of as 'Cartesian'-in this treatise, then, we find a number of significant claims about touch. I begin with two of these claims.1a. Animal life in general is constituted by touch.2b. Human life specifically is characterized by an exact touch.3Aristotle claims that the sense of touch is the sole necessary sense for all animal life. If one of the other senses is over-stimulated, the sense organ will be destroyed. Too much light destroys the eyes; sounds that are too loud destroy the ear. If, how- ever, something similar happens to the sense of touch, the whole organism dies.4 For an animal 'to be alive' therefore means 'to be in touch.'5 This pertains also to human beings who may be regarded as a specific type of animal. However, the touch of human beings is exact as is no touch of any other animal, says Aristotle.Of course in saying this, Aristotle ventures into that familiar mode of anthro- pology which thinks the human on basis of the animal. This is a theoretical field with many pitfalls. In this battlefield, the repeated drawings and erasings of the line of demarcation have left behind a long-and, I should probably add, vio- lent-trajectory. New attempts will undoubtedly remain in dispute. But there will be new attempts. We can be fairly sure of this. Our being-with-the-animal seems constitutive for us humans-perhaps even more so than being a thinking thing. In profound meditations on the animal-or rather on 'the animot'-Derrida has thus paraphrased Descartes to the effect of saying: I follow the animal, therefore I am.6 'I follow it'-meaning at the same time that I am behind it, chasing it; that I walk by its side, together with it; and that I am in front of it, succeeding it. In sum, 'the animal and I' are all around each other. And it is a question whether 'I' can be at all, without following 'the animal.' Can 'I' let 'the animal' be?I do not want to explore this delicate question further here. Let it suffice to say that the way Aristotle follows the animal is at least not without some sophistica- tion. We will notice that he does not distinguish the human being from it as is usually done. He does not say that the human being is an animal with something added on top of a common animality, something which specifies and dignifies it as human-be it reason, freedom, language, morality or some such. No, Aristotle says that the difference lies in that basic dimension which is most common to all animals. The difference in other words lies in touch.In consequence, the straightforward hierarchical structure of life-functions that we quickly perceive upon a first reading of De Anima is strangely inter- rupted. This hierarchy implies that lower functions condition higher functions. But there are some important intersections in this continuum. The first one is between vegetative and animal life. These two life-forms share the basic func- tion of nutrition. As animal life, however, has this function in another way-by locomotion rather than by roots-everything which comes on top is modified. And it is similar at the second intersection, that between animal and human life. They too share a basic function, namely touch. But the human touch is exact. By implication the human life-form is, although still animate through and through, altered pervasively. To the extent that it has the same functions as other animals, it has them in a different way because it already touches differently. And since touch is the element of being-alive, we can say that human beings are in fact dif- ferentiated not due to some on-top quality, but in their very mode of being alive. …