Body and technology: Man, artificiality and social practices

Cartesianism has dealt a decisive blow to the concept of human nature, fostering disenchantment and progressively inducing a levelling of the concept of human nature on a mechanistic model. What is natural in man gradually coincides with natural tout court, which emerges as a form in itself, like matter. But the body is not merely physical: it includes a topology of one’s own body, drawn from the experience of the subject itself. Our body is qualitatively marked as the memory of actions, as the form of space and time, and therefore as the identity of the self, which is grounded upon the original sensori-motor dimension. The second part of the essay presents an analysis on the anthropological relationship existing between body and technique. Different paradigms are critically compared in order to demonstrate that evolution is a bottom up process anchored to a circular interaction between body and environment mediated by behavioural choices, phenotypes and organism development. Here organisms are considered as active agents orientated to modify and co-construct the world where they live. The author, within this framework, interpretes human technique as a body skill, an anthropological feature leading beyond the nature/nurture contraposition which usually animates the scientific debate.