Technical Intelligence, Symbolic Intelligence: The Birth of the Human...?

From the belief in a divine origin that places it outside nature, the image that the human forms of its own genesis has never ceased to evolve, becoming more and more immanent. Bernard Stiegler reviews two of these conceptions, while adopting an innovative position, in La technique et le temps (1994)¹. First comes a critique of the hypothesis of Rousseau², who saw in the ancestor of the human a being in the state of nature, who “receives” technics when he is already “fully formed.” Rousseau’s man in the state of nature is already human, one might say, before being corrupted by technics and life in society: “I shall suppose him to have been formed at all times as I see him today, walking on two feet, using his hands as we do ours³.” This is a human who inhabits an Eden where nothing is lacking, a human being in a precultural and pretechnical state: “I see him satisfying his hunger under an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that provided his meal; and there are his needs satisfied⁴.” Rousseau knows that his human in the state of nature is an idealization. He suspects a process of hominization that he does not set out to study, aware of the embryonic state of the science of his time in 1755⁵, while avoiding the adoption of the religious narrative of a divine origin. His idea of man in the state of nature constitutes a point of departure that allows him to begin his argument, which is more social than anthropological: he aims to think about economic inequalities between humans. The hypothetical genesis of the human, as adopted by Rousseau, implies a strong discontinuity: a human in the state of nature receives technics and opens up to social life suddenly. This hypothesis could be explained only by invoking a transcendent origin of the human, a possibility that anthropology has since considerably called into question.

As mentioned earlier, Leroi-Gourhan contributed greatly to clarifying the genesis of the human – the process of hominization – which he explained, as we have seen, on the basis of a deep and fundamental link with technics. This process led Leroi-Gourhan to consider, among these hominids, the appearance of a form of technical intelligence, over the course of a very gradual evolution in which gesture played a central role, but in which it is the body, starting from its lower parts, that initiates this evolutionary movement: upright posture, associated with the verticalization of the skeleton. The brain accompanies the body in this process by becoming more complex, but it is not its driving force⁶.

In the second volume of Le Geste et la Parole, Leroi-Gourhan problematizes the sudden appearance of what he interprets as a new capacity, which appears above all in Homo sapiens, and which he calls symbolic intelligence. Its relatively sudden emergence, at this moment of evolution, can be understood as a “birth of the human.” The anthropologist links the development of symbolic intelligence to what he considers an exteriorization no longer of gesture, but of memory, associated with communicational processes in collective social functioning – not at the level of the species, but at that of the ethnic group.

1. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., chapter 3, Qui ? Quoi ? L’invention de l’homme.↩︎

2. It is in fact a working hypothesis, as we shall see, which allows Rousseau to set his reflection in motion.↩︎

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Paris : Flammarion, 1755, part one.↩︎

4. Ibid.↩︎

5. “Comparative anatomy has as yet made too little progress, the observations of naturalists are as yet too uncertain,” Ibid.↩︎

6. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p.172-173.↩︎