Philosophies of Technologies

3Thinking in the Anthropocene Era with Henri Bergson

In this chapter, we start from a premise: the Anthropocene is not separate from a certain philosophical trend that began with Plato and is still alive today. This trend is set around a vertical ontology that places humans at the center of the world and at the top of the scale of existing beings, attributing technical capacities to us that exclude all other living beings, which we now know can structurally transform the environment and, beyond that, the various systems that regulate the Earth as a whole.

Descartes’ famous statement that this technical (and scientific) capacity – which has now become a power – has made “man like the master and possessor of nature” (Descartes 1637), legitimizing humanity’s hold over nature, whether in terms of knowing or acting, is the first account of this “age of humans”, the effects of which have only been felt for half a century. There is therefore a profound correlation between this philosophical trend and what we call the “Anthropocene”, from which it would seemingly take too long to escape. Nevertheless, if we are geologically imprisoned today, a deconstruction of this vertical ontology could perhaps enable us to take a psychological, political, economical and philosophical step out of the Anthropocene. This follows the proposal of Sébastien Dutreuil, who suggests that the Anthropocene must first be understood as a political, philosophical and pragmatic concept rather than a geological ...