Die Aufklärung. In the Age of Philosophical Engineering

This invited talk was presented during the worldwide conference on the web, www2012, Lyon April 2012. It addresses the conditions the web can be beneficial for people and for societies in which people lives. The digital technology constitutes the last stage of writing and as such becomes a pharmakon, which could lead as well to the mind destruction as to its renewal. The philosophy of the new “lumières”, the digital era allows to hope, comes also with a philosophy of new shadows the digital pharmakon brings. The technical framework is considered here as, before all, a worldwide contributive framework for publishing and editorializing, constituting a new public thing – res publica. This framework is the last stage of the grammatization process, which started with writing as described by Sylvain Auroux. From alphabet to digits, produced traces by grammatization are tertiary retentions, which modify the set of primary and secondary retentions as they were described by Edmund Husserl. The tertiary retention and its corresponding grammatization constitute the conditions that Michel Foucault described as the archiviolique condition of knowledge. In her analysis of the reading brain and of the digital brain, Maryanne Wolf describes neuronal conditions and effects of the grammatization stages– where it appears that the social « therapeutic » of the digital pharmakon needs to use it for helping a contributive and collective individuation.