2024 - Mai - PositionPaper_HN_EN

Département Humanisme numérique
Position paper
For a critical
digital humanism

With this short programmatic text, the
Department “Humanisme numérique” intends to
position itself in the contemporary debate on
the notion of ‘digital humanism’ and outline its
future research perspectives starting from the
work conducted by its researchers from the
Department’s foundation to the present day.

Département Humanisme numérique - Position Paper
Humanism still?
The notion of humanism is often used in debates
concerning current technological transformations and
their cultural, ethical and political implications, and
its introduction almost always has highly polarising
outcomes. The proposal of a ‘digital humanism’
mostly seems to answer the following question: how
can one ‘remain human’ in a world characterised
by the pervasive presence of technology? How can
we ensure the preservation of human values and
ideals in a context where our lives are increasingly
dependent on technological infrastructures, and
these same infrastructures seem to operate with
increasing autonomy? How and where can we
establish the limits of technologies when they appear
potentially unlimited, so much so that they radically
reconfigure our corporeal and mental condition?
More than this, however, these questions presuppose
anthropological and ethical assumptions that have
not always been fully explored.
On the other hand, according to some, the term
‘digital humanism’ is now outdated: why still appeal
to humanism in an age marked by eroding the
boundaries between human and non-human?
Doesn’t re-proposing ‘humanism’ entail the risk of
once again falling into an undue crystallisation of a
‘universal human nature’, which distinguishes - within
the human - what is human from what is not, fixing
historically and culturally connoted categories as
necessary and timeless? At the same time, does
not referring to the ‘humanistic’ tradition implicitly
mean belittling the forms of systemic oppression and
violence it has generated, with its anthropocentric
and Eurocentric outcomes?
On the contrary, a conscious and appropriate use
of the notion of humanism passes precisely through
rejecting any abstract definition of the ‘human’. The
plurality of figures in the humanist tradition constitutes
a rich reservoir of theoretical and cultural resources.
This stratified and complex treasure trove has yet
to be fully explored. In short, humanism is itself
expressed in many ways, and only by enhancing its
unexpressed potential and rejecting simplifications is
it possible to show in what sense it remains today, not
only as a possibility but even as potentially necessary.
The juxtaposition with the term ‘digital’ then
introduces a further difficulty: how to preserve a
humanist approach, which was historically founded
on the culture of the book and the written page, in
a technological context in which the transmission of
meaning increasingly passes through screens that
integrate words, images, and sounds? Here again,
a different historical sensibility must be mobilised,
one that interprets technology not as an external
correlate of humanist discourse but as a focal point of
that tradition’s commitment. Every epoch - or rather,
every techno-social configuration - has its humanism:
from the Greek paideia to the Italian Renaissance,
from Enlightenment rationalism to the sensitivity to
human rights in the 20 th century, humanist reflection
has always posed its questions precisely from the
nexus between life and technology. The history of
humanisms - in the plural - reveals the centrality of
this nexus. It is not primarily a matter of expressing
a value judgement on technology, but instead of
recognising that it is impossible to think about our
humanity without taking into account the technical
environments, practices, symbolic contexts, and
imaginaries in which it expresses itself and continually
reconfigures itself.
Given this context, it is impossible to use the term
‘humanism’ naively without considering its complex
historical and cultural implications. At the same time,
the call for a humanist position cannot consist of a
simple reaction to specific cultural trends of our time,
a generic attempt to defend or save ‘the human’
against those currents - for example, certain forms of
post-humanism and anti-humanism - that would like
to distance themselves definitively from this model.
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Département Humanisme numérique - Position Paper
Not just an anthropology
To say ‘humanism’ means not limiting oneself to a
simple description of a human being. All humanism
is based on an implicit anthropology but cannot be
reduced to such. A reference to the normative sphere
is inherent, a discourse not on facts but on values.
Regardless of the need to find a definition of the
human, the fundamental point is that a purely empirical
description is still not enough because, unlike other
living beings, it is not enough to be born human to
be human. Even the philosophical anthropology of
the last two centuries has recognised that to become
human, a continuous work of self-moulding, both
ethical and technical, is necessary.
It is, therefore, necessary to recognise the traits that
identify the register of humanist discourse starting
from the specific ways of being and becoming
human. Elaborating on the proposal of a digital
humanism, Milad Doueihi has written - in the wake
of Lévi-Strauss - that anthropological discourse has
focused on the exploration of the other, and thus on
the discovery of other values, other cultures, and
other forms of life. In the face of this effort, humanism
emphasises the otherwise constitutive multimodality
of the human condition. Being human always entails a
certain possibility of being, and above all, a possibility
of being in different ways.
The reference to this multimodality allows us to rethink
the complex relationship between humanism and
universalism. In the first instance, this relationship
presents itself as the ambition to produce a discourse
shared by all on the ‘nature’ of the human being or the
values that distinguish it. In this case, it is necessary
to show that a conscious humanism need not aspire
to establish theories or norms that are valid always
and for all, trans-culturally and trans-historically.
Universality, however, is not only a theoretical or
ethical-political goal; it also concerns the form of
humanist discourse on human nature and values.
Still, it is first and foremost called into question as
a specific human trait. In a more profound sense,
humanist universalism consists of thinking of the
human as the locus of the universal. According to
this approach, the point is not to produce always and
for all valid statements about the human being but to
recognise the human being as that living being which,
unlike all others, is marked by the trait of universality.
In a first sense, a centuries-old tradition has identified
universality as a specific difference of the human
being from other living beings, conceiving him as a
‘rational animal’, i.e. as the only living being capable
of abstraction and thought. In this way, one specific
aspect - rationality - is presented as the only relevant
one: the human being is such when she thinks, not
when she feels, plays, eats, and lives. Yet, what does
‘reason’ mean? Is there a disembodied rationality
detached from the material and symbolic practices
and conditions of acting and communicating?
On the other hand, the mark of universality is much
deeper than the essentialist idea of a ‘human nature’
because it can be retained even when giving up a
definition of the human that is valid once and for all.
In a second sense, the human being is considered
universal because it is indeterminate, lacking
specific differences, and therefore indefinable.
This indefiniteness can be viewed as the result of
a contingency (through Prometheus’ gift of fire in
Plato’s tale), as a divine gift (Pico della Mirandola),
as a biological trait (the German anthropologicalphilosophical
tradition), or as a metaphysical destiny
(the existentialist tradition). Still, it is always in the
same terms: the human being must be nothing specific
and, therefore, can be everything. However, one must
also ask whether this indeterminacy is not an undue
abstraction. The human condition is mutable, but
contingent environmental, historical, and symbolic
conditions always determine its transformations. How
do we think about this mutability? How does one
combine the need to orient oneself starting from an
image of the human being with the need to safeguard
its constitutive openness and plasticity?
Although it eludes both the idea of a specific definition
and the idea of pure indeterminacy, the human condition
is not simply condemned to fragmentariness, as if its
different configurations were closed morphological
singularities. The forms of humana communitas are
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Département Humanisme numérique - Position Paper
never isolated but communicate, and only in the
space of this communication is it possible to identify
a communis humanitas. The interweaving of singular
figures and their material histories weaves the fabric
of what we call ‘humanity’, not understanding it as a
terminus ad quem but as an explorable condition in
which we inhabit and to which we never cease to turn.
As humans, we share physiological needs, practices,
and symbolic structures that constitute a constant
starting point for new relationships, and differences
and commonalities are hospitality conditions. In this
commonality, the last word on the human can never
be spoken.
Between philology and physiology
If one recovers the historical specificity of the
humanistic tradition, one finds a series of resources
that can be identified as tools for understanding the
meaning of communis humanitas. In adopting the
work of Giambattista Vico, we see that Milad Doueihi
profiles digital humanism as constitutively philological.
For Vico, philology is not simply that discipline that
reconstructs and interprets written documents, but
it is also that “consciousness of the Certain” that
constitutes the «knowledge of the languages and
deeds of peoples, both internally, in their customs
and laws, and externally, in their wars, peace treaties,
alliances, travels, commerce» (G. Vico, The New
Science, trans. J. Taylor and R. Miner, Yale University
Press, New Haven 2020, p. 77) .
Philology presents itself as a science of culture
tout court oriented by very precise methodological
coordinates: philology is not theory, pure
contemplation, or speculation. The philologist starts
from documents and, more generally, from objects.
Her domain is the sphere of tangible things, from the
materiality of individuals to the concreteness of finds.
It is only from a careful analysis of these things that
the philologist can access the symbolic dimension, the
discourses and practices that these things subtend.
In this sense, digital humanism is materialist
because it is philological; however, its materialism
should not be confused with a position that reduces
human beings to the material dimension. Instead, it
represents a methodological approach that implies a
general thesis about culture: every symbolic or value
sphere, every theoretical or cultural praxis exists
based on specific material conditions, i.e. objects,
resources, practices, power and labour relations, and
environmental contexts.
However, the appeal to a philological method does
not imply an absolutisation of writing and the book
as privileged forms of cultural transmission. On
the contrary, philology is understood here as a
theory of mediality, in which the philological attitude
questions the transformation of our ideas of reason,
communication, and action in an age marked
by the shift from the typographic model to digital
technologies. It can only escape the alternative
between two equally abstract forms of particularism
and indeterminacy by recognising that the human
condition is always technologically situated.
Suppose this relationship of co-implication between
technologies, processes of subjectivity production
and imaginaries is valued. In that case, the philological
method is no longer the simple application, from the
outside, of an already structured formal knowledge.
Each object poses its questions and demands the
development of a particular method. Specifically,
the objects of the ‘digital philologist’ are those found
everywhere in the public spaces of industrialised
societies: the new philology deals with screens
and applications, networks and clouds, profiles and
sharing services.
A direct consequence of this approach is the centrality
of the corporeal dimension: following the Nietzschean
example, philology is, therefore, physiology. The
physiological reference should not be understood in
an allegorical sense, i.e. based on some diagnostic
metaphor, whereby society or the world is considered
as a body to be surgically analysed. On the contrary,
the idea of a ‘physiology of culture’ refers to the need
to base analyses of any kind - including those of an
ethical and symbolic nature - on the recognition of
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Département Humanisme numérique - Position Paper
the centrality of a body that cannot be thought of
either as the natural support of a supposed ‘superior
cognitive faculty’, or as an object that obeys, in
a promethean fashion, a purely design-oriented
approach. On the contrary, corporeity is the dimension
in which the situated character of human experience
becomes more evident, in which the possibility
of transformation does not escape a network of
conditions, presuppositions, and opportunities.
An Ethics and Aesthetics of the
Affections
Based on this philological approach, a humanist
ethics of the digital cannot be conceived as an
abstract theoretical formulation, as the elaboration of
a general model to be applied a priori to any single
case. Rather, in this perspective, the normative
dimension emerges from the description itself, leaving
it to the specific technological condition of humanity –
in this case, the digital condition – to determine what
problems, opportunities, dangers, and expectations
exist.
More fundamentally, the model underlying a humanist
ethical conception cannot be the naively teleological
one, structured according to a linear succession
of means and ends. The history of technology
teaches us that so-called ‘progress’ is a bumpy path
composed of contingencies, sudden course changes,
and unexplored potentials. A design ethic takes into
account the co-production of technology and culture.
The engineer who designs the technical object must
not only reduce risks or minimise damage; At the
same time, she is influenced by the technological,
economic, and cultural context in which she acts,
as well as by her designs, values, and production of
imaginaries. From this perspective, technical objects
cannot be conceived as mere tools or a destiny that
determines our form of life a priori.
A philological approach to ethical issues considers
the structural relationship between the body,
technological environment, and socio-cultural sphere.
Ethical and cultural issues do not arise later but are
already embedded in the design processes - first -
and social implementation - later - of technological
devices and practices. In the same way, technology
is not a ‘second’ dimension to a supposedly ‘natural’
bodily experience: our relationship with technology
is primarily affective because each technology
determines a specific configuration of our sensitivity
and motility. For this reason, ethics thus conceived
is, first and foremost, an aesthetics in the sense of a
theory of sensitivity: all ethical problems are rooted
in our material constitution, which configures us as
sensitive and medial beings porous to the world.
In light of this intertwining, the relevance of the
Christian theological tradition for historical humanisms
takes on a particular significance. Theology here
is not to be understood as a list of doctrines or a
speculative reflection on what transcends experience;
on the contrary, the theological tradition offers us a
thesaurus for analysing human experience. From this
point of view, Christian theological anthropology can
be understood as a phenomenological description of
possible ways of inhabiting the world but also of the
moments that exceed this dimension: the interstices,
fractures, moments of transcendence, and ecstasy
are as much a constitutive part of human experience
as the processes of co-determination between the
individual and the world. The human being is always
in the world, but the experience of not belonging
to it is an inextricable part of human existence as
well: this nuance of meaning also contributes to the
richness of our feelings. This anthropological tradition
has developed a very rich apparatus of resources
designed to think about the aspects of our experience
that are irreducible to the purely ‘worldly’ dimension.
This toolbox proves to be all the more precious for the
philologist of digital environments.
The intertwining of ethics and aesthetics determines
the critical character of the digital humanism
proposed here. Criticism, understood as the capacity
to exercise a sensibility irreducible to the simple
sphere of argumentation, consists in that krinein, that
discernment that is progressively shaped through the
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Département Humanisme numérique - Position Paper
experience of things themselves, and not through the
top-down application of a pre-determined method.
This position fully resonates with the interactional
perspective, which directly engages with concrete
technological cases and understands ethical
reflection.
It is worth remembering that digital culture is a culture
of the discrete. In the theological and humanistic
tradition, ‘discretio’ has a double meaning. In the
first sense, discretio is the capacity to discern and
explore reality by consciously following the rhythm
of things. In this sense, it is essential to emphasise
that a flexible ethics of technique does not propose
vague or unsound models; on the contrary, the aim is
to respect the principle of maximum adherence to the
concreteness of the case under examination.
In a second sense, discretion is an art of proper
distance: from Cassian to Baltasar Gracián, a discreet
ethic knows how to approach things correctly and take
their measure. An example of this ability is the monk’s
life: it is not a matter of withdrawal into oneself but of
a perspective exercise in which one can balance selfknowledge,
interaction with the world, and the search
for God. We can distance ourselves from the world
because it is never a simple fact that is presented to
us in a univocal way. The same applies to our history:
tradition is not destiny.
Conclusions
The gesture of returning to the humanistic tradition
has nothing nostalgic about it. There is no original truth
to recover, no golden age to reproduce. The premise
of this address is the realisation that our past needs
to be more transparent to us and that our history can
continually offer us new and unhoped-for resources.
What we seek from cultural history are not buried
truths but theoretical tools capable of reorienting our
view of things and experiential analyses that resonate
with our contemporary condition. Retracing the
paths of classical humanism, seeking what remains
unthought of in them, can help us understand what
humanism can and can no longer be today.
This means thinking of a humanism that draws on
tradition but whose efforts are oriented towards the
future. The digital humanism that fuels our project does
not defend any pre-constituted image of the human
being; it is not designed to ‘save’ anything in the face of
progress. It is not a humanism against or for the digital.
The challenge is to conceive digital technologies not
as objects but as subjects of humanistic discourse
and ethical elaboration. The requirement at the heart
of digital humanism is to think to the depths of our
technical constitution and to elaborate a theoretical
and ethical reflection on the human condition that is
not simply applied to technology but arises from our
constitutive relationship with it. In this key, a direct and
careful confrontation with the actual developments of
individual technologies does not allow the elaboration
of a ‘general theory of the digital’ but requires the
development of hermeneutical and critical tools to
explore the ethical and theoretical problems that
emerge from the technological transformations
themselves, from the analysis of practices and their
material conditions. Not a theory but a philology of
the digital.
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