In 1939, Paul Valéry already noted that his contemporaries were suffering from “intoxication by haste”: “The exaggeration of all means of communication,” he wrote, “subjects minds to generalized agitation and nervousness. We live under the perpetual regime of disruption of our intelligences. […]. Our bodies and minds must absorb, without a day of rest, as much music, painting, drugs, strange drinks, travel, sudden changes in altitude, temperature, political and economic anxiety, as any humanity together, over the course of three centuries, could once absorb it!”
What would he say if he came back to us? Probably nothing, because it is likely that he would die instantly: with the advent of digital technology, the observation that he established more than eight decades ago has only been accentuated to gigantic proportions that even him could not have imagined.
But there are many intellectuals and philosophers who, in the meantime, thought it necessary to sound the alarm, each in their own way. In 1941, shortly before committing suicide, Stefan Zweig wrote: “Technology has brought down no worse curse on us than by preventing us, even for a second, from escaping the present.” In 1956, in The Obsolescence of Man, Günther Anders for his part predicted that with television, the home would no longer have any other function than to contain “the screen of the outside world”. In 2001, in The Dislocated Man, Nicolas Grimaldi deplored that electronic communication inevitably leads to a “frenzy of immediacy”. Today, the analysis continues, with relentless diagnostics. Very recently, in digital schizophrenia, Anne Alombert explained that we are racing towards “the industrialization of minds and the automation of otherness”. And in Spectral Life, a work which has just been published, Eric Sadin warns against the “increasing pixelation of our existences” and the “becoming a vegetable” of humanity. He denounces the “generalized promptness” which crushes the rhythm of our existence and “results in a powerful mobilization of our attention”.
According to the theory of relativity, the offset of clocks results from their relative movement in space. But, of course, it is not our respective movements, ridiculously slow compared to the light, which detune our personal rhythms: if, when several of us find ourselves in the same place, we have the impression of not inhabiting the same present, of not really being togethernot really synchronousit’s because each of us can choose what is happening to him. Thanks to the portable technological tools that we now possess, our society has indeed been able to generate “chronodispersive” entropy” which allows everyone to choose, single out and personalize what they deal with, what they give their attention to.
Towards a new rise of the spirit?
The question that arises today is therefore: what becomes of the “life of the mind” in such a world full of screens, constantly punctuated by clicks, saturated with information, excited by what the same Paul Valéry already called the “fantastic scintillation of events”?
In his latest book, Revive the spirit in this world, the philosopher François Jullien, worried, tackles this question head-on: decline of the Book, loss of presence, “the vice of coincidence”, he begins by noting that the mind “falls back”, in sense in which it progressively loses height, finds itself deprived of its growth, becomes narrower (a bit like a herd that is “slaughtered”). This transformation is so silent that we hardly pay attention to it, until the day it becomes completely audible (a bit like climate change, which we have long pretended not to take seriously before it imposes itself, at the turn of spectacular crises, as a real emergency).
Is this reduction inevitable? We can hope not, explains François Jullien. Because just as the invention of photography forced painting to rethink itself, to “stand away from itself” by inventing abstraction, why would the ever more perfected development of artificial intelligence not cause – not, also through the effect of the technical competition that it imposes on it, a new development of the spirit?
Etienne Klein is a physicist, research director at the CEA and philosopher of science
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