Pourquoi nous ne ferons rien pour l’environnement
(Why we will do nothing for the environment)[1]
By Alain Papaux
Alain Papaux is Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Together with Dominique Bourg, he edited the Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique (Dictionary of Ecological Thought) (2015), published by Presses Universitaires de France.
Homo is sapiens, intelligent, according to Karl von Linné. Sapience distinguishes the human species from other living species. Homo is also demens, as a century of psychoanalytic practice and the immeasurable barbarity of the 20th century have taught us. Homo is essentially faber, argues Alain Papaux, following in the footsteps of Henri Bergson and Hannah Arendt: his propensity to do (faber) far outweighs his inclination toward restraint and wisdom.
The author roots his thinking in an observation: “Visceral inclinations must prevent us from degrowth, keep us from the humility that is nevertheless expected [by the reality of the environmental crisis], and plunge us back, after each jolt of conscience and burst of caution, into a devouring activity that is wasteful of energy and materials. This is how we recognize faber within ourselves, more alive and more significant than sapiens” (p. 647, my parenthesis). “Thus [human beings] abandon themselves to technology, handing over the keys to their destiny: the artificialization of the Earth, the domestication of the world, and finally the crushing of the planet, of which this brainless creature will ultimately be the victim” (back cover, my parenthesis).
This book questions what makes humans “peculiar,” what is essential to them, “specific” in the sense of “belonging only to one species, which makes it possible to circumscribe it, if not define it in its entirety” (p. 346). The interest of the notion of “peculiar” lies in its openness to exceptions, to the otherness of species in relation to each other, to the “niches” that each species occupies in the ecosystemic world of the biosphere.
Papaux notes – with ethology – that “technique is accidental for animals; it is added to qualities that can exist without it, whereas it is revealed in the very exercise of human nature, since humans cannot exist without technique [...] Animals could display technical behaviors without detracting from the technical depth of humans, namely their essence: technique is them, it is not outside them” (p. 344, my italics). A psychoanalyst might paraphrase Winnicott observing that a baby alone does not exist without its parents, that it forms with them a symbiotic entity imposed by its fundamental neoteny, and say that a human being does not exist without a technique that is literally vital for him to survive, or even to live while feeling that he exists in an ecosystemic environment. Technique is vital to humans in order to “make a world” with living beings “other than humans.”
“Making a world.” This human project is at the heart of Alain Papaux's work. Human beings are in the world, like other species. But they are not ontologically of the world, he writes. They are in the world through a bodily biology that links them to all living things. They are not of the world in the sense of belonging to a species that is spontaneously and naturally embedded in the fabric of the biosphere's ecosystemic links, as are all other species. They are "without a peculiar ecological niche. Constrained to be technicians, therefore.” (p. 16). Human beings cannot “form a world” naturally, like other species. They can only insert themselves into the biosphere through a technical ability that allows them to create an artificial “niche” – literally made of artifacts – in the ecosystemic world. From then on, “the entire earth will become their ‘peculiar’ niche.” (p. 16).
Alain Papaux draws on Greek mythology to illustrate this human condition. He does so in the manner of a psychoanalyst who considers a myth to be an individual dream that has achieved collective success by speaking to each and every one of us, in a self-reflective way, about the dynamics of the unconscious.
The myth chosen by the author is that of Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus. Ecology readily emphasizes Prometheus to evoke the excessive power of human technique, the author notes. But it often neglects to question the anthropological—even psychodynamic—springs of the contemporary “unleashed Prometheus.” While the intimate place of technique in the embodied existence of man, its intrinsic role in his very being, is revealed by Prometheus' twin brother, Epimetheus, in an even more edifying way, Papaux points out.
Epimetheus and Prometheus are tasked by Zeus with endowing living beings with diverse and varied properties so that their species can live in harmony with one another according to natural “predator-prey” relationships, i.e., according to the dynamic balances of the biosphere's ecosystems (p. 41).
Epimetheus, “whose name means ‘the thoughtless one’, the one who sees ‘after’ the consequences of his actions” (p. 16), is responsible for distributing the various qualities of nature (speed, cunning, dangerousness, etc.) among the different creatures of the living world so that they do not destroy each other, but live together in harmony. At the end of his work as faber, all living beings are harmoniously endowed with the foundations of an authentic communal life, forming an ecosystemic cosmos. Satisfied with his work, his “bag empty” of qualities to distribute, Epimetheus called Prometheus—the twin “who sees ahead, anticipates,” as his name indicates—and asked him what quality he had given to human beings. Epimetheus then realized that the human species had simply been forgotten, writes Papaux. “Epimetheus, or negligence at the beginning of the world.” (p. 41).
Lacking a specific quality to inhabit the world, to protect themselves from predators and from themselves, Epimetheus establishes humans as incomplete, vulnerable, and flawed beings, fundamentally neotenic and doomed to adapt to the world in an attempt to create a world (p. 16). To compensate for this lack of being in nature, to compensate for man's “a-nature,” writes Papaux, Prometheus provides man with technique—by stealing fire. “Prometheus, or technical cunning to the rescue of mankind (p. 47).”
This is how Greek mythology depicts the essence of human beings and the destiny of humanity in the tutelary figures of Epimetheus and Prometheus: technique is a product of human incompleteness; it compensates for this incompleteness while projecting humans beyond themselves. The myth links human technical superpower to a fundamental lack, to a “thoughtlessness,” writes Papaux, which condemns homo sapiens to be, in principle, nothing more than homo faber, a creature creating itself above nature in a potentially arrogant technical gesture (p. 15). The author defines this “thoughtlessness” as follows: “Human finitude refers to defect, deprivation, absence. Here, deprivation of the quality of being naturally part of the world, since ‘animals’ is the reference genus, forcing ‘human’ life into the paradox of an a-nature in order to be natural, through technique in this case, in order to constitute our being in the world. A being—a dwelling—that remains entirely singular in relation to other animals because it is artifactual: made by and thanks to artifacts.” (p. 606).
The technique for overcoming neoteny—the fundamental, innate, anatomical, and physiological immaturity of human beings—which Epimetheus could symbolize: the duration of human neoteny from birth confirms in matter, in anatomy, the consubstantial lack that Epimetheus manifests in his mind through his thoughtlessness. Because of his neoteny, man cannot ignore his physiological, zoological, and biospheric integration, “for his life depends on it.” In order to immerse himself in the biosphere “and remain there without being absorbed by it, he needs technique, unlike other creatures in the world” (p. 43). It is a question of survival first and foremost, of adapting human a-nature to ecosystemic nature in order to respond to a “necessity of life, an animal urgency, the ecological imperative to nest,” writes Papaux (p. 45).
This is why technique is not a set of means at the service of the human species, but a “way of being in the world" (p. 53), the author points out. Homo can only inhabit the world through an effort of fabrication, by creating its “ecological” niche with techniques and artifacts, “with gestures of a-nature to hold itself in nature” (p. 18). Technique is thus an extension of its biological corporeality; it is a sum of “inorganic organs” (p. 284); it constitutes an “exosoma” that seems to extend the womb with a belly of technical artifacts. By maintaining a fetal, symbiotic relationship with its technical environment, “homo faber does not see that the use of technique is less the mark of man's triumphant march over the elements than the unconscious admission of his finitude,” of his constitutive neoteny (p. 71).
In essence, technique is experienced viscerally (p. 51), without any room for freedom, reveals the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus, as well as the experience of our most everyday life: homo is an “artefice-man”, concludes Dominique Bourg (1986). Consequently, it occupies a tragic position in the biosphere. It suffers from a paradox: unfit for any natural ecological niche, it is condemned to create one in the bed of the biosphere on which its life depends (p. 297). In order to become at one with the biosphere to which he belongs as a living human being, “his particular way of exercising his nature through technique and artifacts leads to an artificialization of the biosphere that seems to contradict his peculiar essence as a living being.” The absence of technique and artifice condemns him to death or animality, and a plethora of techniques leads to the artificial totalization of the Earth, “paving the way for the planetary crushing of this homo faber” (p. 288).
Consequently, technique alone cannot be the answer to our ecological and environmental problems, since it is itself part of the problem: we do not lack power, Papaux points out (p. 22), “we are overflowing with it, powerless because we have too much of it.” In humans, faber far outweighs sapiens, to the point of making them the primary geological force of the Earth System. Indeed, the Anthropocene marks the reign of homo faber, “the realization that the Earth can only be populated by ever more powerful and numerous artifacts, omnipotent, in a mechanical way, that is to say, as many as there are humans” (p. 298), as techniques are perfected and energies multiply[2]. To quote Bergson: “It is in the mold of action that our intelligence has been cast. Speculation is a luxury, while action is a necessity” (p. 44).
At the same time, the Anthropocene heralds the fall of homo faber at the limits of the biosphere, through the global destruction of the source of its life (p. 25), due to the intimate, vital, and now fragile interdependence of humans and ecosystems (p. 50). The Anthropocene is history becoming geography, comments Michel Serres (p. 521).
The banality of evil here is that of techniques aimed at good, at the best, at neutrality in the worst case, but which chance or fate, naivety or cynicism now pervert into damage to the biosphere, emphasizes Papaux (p. 37). Because of our technical exosoma, we will therefore only know “Pyrrhic victories, choices of the lesser evil”, he says. And he quotes Paul Valéry: “Man has conquered the entire habitable expanse. The earth, the sea, the air, and the night belong to him [...] His power is magical, beyond his understanding. He can do much more than he knows.” (p. 33, my italics). Humanity has become a “world-object” (a concept coined by Michel Serres), and with it the techniques it has created, which determine its way of being in the world, its way of inhabiting the Earth system (what environmental scientists call “the ecumene”) as a whole. Consequently, “technique becomes our environment; it seems to become autonomous through our lack of control, simply because of its massification, as if it were enveloping us” (p. 493).
“The entry into the Anthropocene makes the omnipresence of our moral dilemmas more evident: the environment is now us” (p. 298, my italics). The more human beings multiply techniques, the more they artificialize their environment, even their own bodies, and the further they move away from nature. “Humanity” expresses the strangeness of being in the world only by abstracting oneself from it (p. 18), while at the same time the emergence of the Anthropocene marks the planetary confinement of humankind (p. 500).
Alain Papaux describes two ways of exercising human technical exosoma, which open up two types of competing freedoms (p. 277).
On the one hand, a technique that extends the body, consisting of “inorganic organs”, which is “organological,” compatible with insertion into the biosphere. By recognizing our condition as living beings as a given, as an essential finitude, this sapiens use of technique offers freedom of immersion in the biosphere. This use of technique allows humans to exist in the world without being absorbed by it, while respecting its ecosystems (p. 308), with a modesty that invites us to tame nature, not dominate it, in order to co-evolve with it. Think, for example, of the paradigmatic conquest of fire and cooking, and that of the use of language, the most organic of techniques (p. 368).
Then, on the other hand, there is an ever more powerful technique that neglects this body, even suppresses it, a “technological technique” that tears human life away from its ecosystemic environments in a movement based on a rejection of corporeality and instincts, on a disqualification of biological limits, to the point of denying the corporeal finitude of transhumanist delusion (p. 67). From then on, Papaux notes, “we no longer understand ourselves as ordered by nature, we no longer form a ‘cosmos’ with it.” (p. 276). On this point, we can think of the paradigmatic conquest of nuclear fire and that of artificial intelligence.
“If nature is our niche, like all living beings, we inhabit it only through a technique that separates us from it [...] Artifice, which is part of human nature, makes us strangers to nature.” (p. 285). “A little technique allows (humans) to adapt, to be in the world (and more simply to the world), to ‘correspond’ to it; a lot [of technique] distances them from it by making their presence increasingly mediated” and destructive (p. 306, my parenthesis). Techniques prove to be ambivalent in use, according to the classic Greek figure of the pharmakon, a remedy or poison depending on the dosage (p. 19). “Technique is a conquest that turns ipso facto into defeat once a certain size is reached, and of which ‘Anthropocene’, man as a geological force, speaks of excess, since, as living beings, we cannot do without the biosphere” (p. 309) which our technique nevertheless disrupts. The technical animal having absorbed the last niches left to it by the ecological world, the biological niche – the biosphere – is saturated with human presence, objects, and waste. “Technique precipitates us into wandering; we no longer have anywhere to escape it.” (p. 521).
“Technique, which answered the pressing question of humanity's survival in its early days, now poses the urgent question of humanity's survival at its possible end.” (p. 356).
This is why the reduction in the flow of materials and energy that a full recognition of the environmental crisis would require us to undertake today seems illusory: “it neglects the fact that we are only marginally ‘wise’ or prudent. Perhaps wisdom is the most widely shared thing in the world, but it is not the most widely practiced. Its practice remains sparse” (p. 382). In other words, giving up the power of technology is not just a matter of comfort or material living standards, but an ontological challenge, concludes Alain Papaux (p. 383). Faced with the challenge of the environmental crisis, the ontological reflex of homo is to show himself to be faber, and to request: what new techniques should be implemented to avoid it? To counter it? To live as before? Human ontology tends to seek extrinsic, technical solutions to a question as intrinsic as that of choosing degrowth. Calls for degrowth can only remain dead letters when addressed to homo sapiens, because it is to homo faber that we should be able to speak (p. 405).
The book then leads the author to focus on the emotional life of contemporary man, his profound experience of technology, and the relational and social impact of technology that has become all-powerful. He describes a sequence of disenchantments.
Alain Papaux evokes “the shame of contemporary man, who senses that his powers will not be able to control the environmental disaster he has caused through his own excesses. However uninhibited “Prometheus Unbound” may be, he finds himself chained by his own techniques,“ by the object-worlds constructed by his technical superpower and which have become the environment in which “Prometheus” is immersed (p. 499): the flows of energy and matter from the machinery of the industrial and technological revolution; the concrete, tar, and glass of buildings; the steel of vehicles; the military-industrial complex, whose paradigm is the atomic situation, cyberspace and its Artificial Intelligence; and even the universe of waste, which infiltrates every drop of rain and every living cell, thus creating the object-world that is the environmental crisis.
Let's consider a paradigmatic example: our immersion in the digital world and Artificial Intelligence, this machine that disseminates and collects data from the internet, enveloping our daily lives and, literally, our planet with Starlink satellites. AI, this machine that “knows” better than we do, to which we attribute the gift of telling us—like a Pythia or an exosomatic brain—who we are, what our feelings are, and what choices to make. Digital technology in-forms us. “Machines that think [...] rarely present themselves as hypotheses, but rather as models to which the logic of living beings is summoned to submit, by force,”
Digital technology is nothing more than the abandonment of human beings to their own creations, an expression of their thoughtlessness, argues Papaux. A psychoanalyst might add that this abandonment is also an unconscious act of surrender to the “invisible third” of cyberspace, namely the creators and owners of algorithms and AI.
“The decision of the ‘machine’ is never anything more than the often hidden choice of the owner-programmer, as revealed by the biases of the ‘machine’, which are humanly racist, sexist, and homophobic, reflecting its designers and the databases used to educate its algorithms” (p. 497). Through digital technology and AI,
the keys to our consumer, political, and ethical choices—that is, the keys to our destiny—are entrusted to the owners of algorithms, idealized as “tech giants.” As Prometheus? With digital technology and AI, humanity could be on the verge of giving a brain to its technical exosoma, a brain entirely humanly directed by the unconscious of homo faber. “We are now immersed in a digital bubble much more than in the biosphere,” writes Papaux (p. 521). This is what we need to free ourselves from, a psychoanalyst would say, in order to recognize our connection as children of the biosphere.
Digital technology and AI thus appear to be the quintessence of a “world-object” projected before us to “create a world” through the artificialization of the world rather than to be part of the world of the biosphere.
We thus seem to have trapped ourselves intellectually (through the standardization of knowledge) and emotionally (when the intimate, made visible, becomes “the extimate”, and private life increasingly confused with public life), in the blurring caused by the “mimetic logic“ that underlies the economic logic of digital technology and AI, writes Papaux (p. 508). On social media, “we no longer look at the world, we react to it” (p. 527).
Digital technology, and the grip of its “informatic contagion”, has thus invaded all behaviors, even the most everyday ones, imposing a form of domestication of individuals that is much deeper than the privatization of society. Alain Papaux sees this as a “biopower” that constitutes a major obstacle to any ecological transition, since it concerns not only our lifestyles, but “the very principle of living together,” because “digital man creates society through the private sphere” (p. 527): “Bauman's liquid society and digital presentism are hardly reassuring in this perspective of widespread manipulation” (p.616).
As human beings are technical animals, they are inclined to ‘naturalize’ the expansion of their world objects, to accept as “self-evident” their peculiar immersion in their technical niche, in a defensive manner vis-à-vis their shame and Promethean guilt, according to Alain Papaux.
The naturalization of colossal technical actions—that is, considering them as if they were “self-evident”—allows us to exonerate humans from their responsibility, placing technique in a position of exteriority in relation to them, denying that “technique is them.” This naturalization operates on the model of our relationship with nature, which is also externalized to the point of appearing split from humanity in so-called Western culture, “this vast dwelling with two superimposed planes” – nature and culture – described by Philippe Descola (2006).
However, Papaux observes, with the support of environmental science, that the more humans separate themselves from the world of fauna, flora, and microorganisms, the more they condemn themselves. At the height of an exosomatic technique of tearing themselves away from the biosphere, humans find themselves paradoxically restored to their animal condition, deprived of the ability to “create a world”, faced with a nature that has become hostile and overpowering, recording each of his unfortunate gestures vis-à-vis the precarious balance, initially favorable to human adventure, within a homeostatic whole of the planet (p. 506). Indeed, if contemporary technique “goes without saying”, like nature during the Holocene, what can we do about it? The author offers an interesting hypothesis about AI: “Technique is thus endowed with an autonomy in design, unconscious, to make it responsible for the evil that has befallen us, since such misfortune cannot be of our making. This destiny, as digital technology may be today, is nothing more than the pre-awareness, then the realization, of an anticipated loss of control”, of which the Anthropocene is the sign, and the environmental crisis is the most radical reality today (p. 494).
To conclude, how can we resolve ourselves to the only choice possible in a situation of environmental crisis: that of degrowth? What words can we find to touch our “Promethean shame” (p. 407) at being so neotenic, so destructive of the biosphere, the source of our life, asks Papaux? How can we feel and think about our shame at being nothing more than a flawed human animal, both outside the biosphere (and its ecosystems) and outside ourselves (due to our immeasurable exosomatic technique)?
Resolving to integrate ourselves into nature for our own survival can only revive the painful presence, the pain and the fear of our lack of being in the biosphere, which condemns the human animal, deprived of its own niche, to endlessly produce artifacts in order to remain there. However, with the Anthropocene, the environmental crisis, this new face of nature, imposes a limit on homo faber, on the animal that is too technical and insufficiently respectful of its original “primal scene” (as a psychoanalyst would say): the creative fertility of the biosphere.
If homo faber continues on its current path of tearing itself away from the living ecosystem, a renaturation, albeit involuntary, forced and passively endured, will one day take place through the planetary crushing of humanity against the limits of the biosphere, the author believes.
Today, the real question is how to control the omnipotence of technology and human elation, Papaux remarks. How can we free ourselves from our psychological (and physical) retreat into symbiosis with our object-worlds in order to try to rediscover our ontological condition as children of the biosphere? To try to insert ourselves into its ecosystemic life rather than tear ourselves away from it, whatever the biosphere may become in the Anthropocene.
The “Promethean shame” so finely described by the author thus appears as a potential individual and collective psychological warning signal that resonates throughout Alain Papaux's work. This alarm signal is a source of insight into the fundamental dilemma posed by our technical ability and our essence as homo faber: realistic integration into the biosphere, even if it is that of the Anthropocene, or tearing ourselves away from it, an illusory escape into the delusion of transhumanism?
We need to “ecologize” humanity, the author believes (p. 293), to tame nature rather than dominate it, to co-evolve with it. The book as a whole contributes to this project. We should become aware of the finitude of our nature as living beings and our absolute dependence on the ecosystems of the planet where we happen to live; we should help humanity emerge from its technical object-worlds and stop tearing itself away from nature.
It is on this point that the ability to feel Promethean shame can be a source of insight, of awareness that the fertile nature of the Holocene is retreating, lost in a massive loss of biodiversity and climate disruption that is accelerating as we pass through climate tipping points that are irreversible by human means.
We must rise up against a mindset of which Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, was perhaps a particularly eloquent and laconic spokesperson: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” (p. 569). In other words, there is a right of the strongest that allows Westerners to maintain their lifestyle, Papaux summarizes, beyond the ethics of the Charter of Human Rights. The author sees in this aporia, which gambles with the human race for the profit of a minority, a typical choice of homo faber, an expression - among many others - of his thoughtlessness, a challenge to homo sapiens (p. 568). When technical overpower speaks in this way, can we still think that the community is constitutive of the human being, he requests? (p. 14). Homo shows himself to be faber even in politics, which he disposes of as an artifact that he makes and unmakes as he pleases.
It is therefore a question of protecting human beings from the excesses of the violence of their faber by renewing human rights “in order to interpret them in the light of the ultimate purpose of environmental law” and the protection of the biosphere as the environment in which we live (p. 579). “In other words, renouncing power is not just a matter of comfort or material standard of living, but an ontological challenge to ‘re-in-form’ our nature on this crux where the overestimation of our wisdom and the underestimation of the faber are at stake” (p. 383, my italics). The beating heart of Alain Papaux's book pulsates on this point.
“The finite world [in that it heralds the possible end of humanity] into which we are entering nolens volens, whose tension is violently expressed by the phrase ‘big world, small planet,’ results first and foremost from the ever-increasing and increasingly unbearable incommensurability of the ecumene [culture] and the ecological [nature], a question of size [one crushing the other] that will force a reversal of the question of law [...] This pragmatic vein reveals the inadequacy of an anthropology of individualistic human rights, which is inadequate in view of the holistic (in the scientific mode) and collective (in the political mode) nature of environmental disaster” (pp. 588-589, my parentheses). This is why Alain Papaux argues for the preeminence of environmental rights over human rights, and against the entirely faber, technical illusion of this very human way of thinking, “we have always found a solution!”, which reduces the finitude of human beings to a “problem that science, technology, and human ingenuity will sooner or later solve. Death itself is now seen as a problem, as is nature when it stands in our way” (p. 469). From now on, “it is man who is considered immortal and nature perishable” (p. 612). What madness! He therefore doubts that technique alone is the answer to our ecological predicament, for “our dreams of mastery will end up creating monsters that will devour us” (p. 469).
Papaux places his hope in the emergence of an anthropology of human finitude to recover a sense of proportion under the emotional and existential pressure of environmental disaster. This anthropology of finitude would practice “listening” to the bio-geo-physical “listening” of the biosphere (the environmental crisis), listening to the disappearance of the Holocene nature under the impact of the actions of homo faber. There is a “kingdom” to be rediscovered, he believes, that of the essential finitude of our bodily, carnal incarnation in the biosphere. How can we disalienate ourselves from world-objects and find the words to speak to faber?
Anthropological and psychoanalytical note
I believe that this major work by Alain Papaux poses two questions for psychoanalysis. At the very least. The first could be that of the Sphinx: “Homo sapiens demens faber, child of the biosphere and technique, who are you?”
Each analyst will answer according to their personal professional narrative, according to their theoretical and clinical experience woven from the history of their affiliations and psychoanalytic encounters (including those with their patients). They will also answer according to their conception of the death drive, which could constitute one of the backgrounds to this book.
Personally, perhaps in line with Bion, I could see sapiens as an expression of the “non-psychotic” part of the personality, adult and realistic, on an individual level. On a collective level, how can we not think of the “working group”, that group function whose characteristics, according to Bion, are “analogous to those that Freud attributed to the ego”, analogous to those of a mother capable of reverie, playfulness, and support.
I would see the demens as the psychotic part of the personality in action. The wildly narcissistic part that cannot tolerate otherness, limits, frustration, waiting, or dependence. The part that relentlessly attacks the ego functions of the non-psychotic part of the personality, out of envy for their creativity and in order to detach itself from an external and internal reality that is unbearable for it, which aspires so defensively to the omnipotent self-generation of a delusional world. Its group counterpart would be the “basic assumptions” described by Bion to represent the vagaries of the “working group” struggle with a deranged group emotionality whose fantasized omnipotence can sometimes produce, for example, a leader with populist characteristics who governs the collective according to his fantasies and personal interests rather than in accordance with a shared reality.
The undifferentiated nature of the faber and its urgency to act through the behavioral discharge of raw emotional experiences evokes the beta mentality of the protomental underpinnings of personality and human communities.
In my opinion, Alain Papaux's book also raises another question that is highly relevant in the Anthropocene era and at the heart of a spiraling environmental crisis: “Homo sapiens demens faber, what are you doing to the planet that gave birth to you? Will you be able to think about the raw emotion of your neotenic condition in the radically new historical, technical, social, and ecological context of the 21st century? Will you remain faber demens or will you become faber sapiens?”
I can only offer a personal comment on this question. I could see in the three states sapiens, demens, and faber, three intertwined destinies of a human neoteny that, throughout life, is waiting to be co-thought, co-created by emotional encounters with others. I will take as an example the destinies of the sense of catastrophe which, according to Bion, characterizes the beta, protomental mentality, and the modalities of its transformation into dream activity.
Bion makes the sense of catastrophe an invariant of our thinking activity and an original link to the most undifferentiated aspects, faber, of our personality. The link to catastrophe thus appears as a proto-affect, as a preconception of the links of love, hate, and knowledge. We could represent our entire thinking activity as the work of a rope maker who endlessly weaves links of catastrophe, links of love, links of hate, and links of knowledge.
This work has its successes (the sapiens?), its failures (the demens?) and its remnants that never reach the state of thought, discharged into behavior (the faber?). The “feeling” of catastrophe—particularly heightened today by the environmental crisis and which we could consider a driving force behind the current rise of fascism—is waiting to be heard by others as a “sign of catastrophe.” The feeling of catastrophe carries with it a hope that others will intuitively be able to see it as a “sign” of a personal or collective threat of catastrophe, and that they will respond by developing a reverie that gives “meaning” to the catastrophe. It is when this process, which goes from “feeling” to ‘sign’ to “meaning,” unfolds under favorable conditions that sapiens appear, we might think.
It is possible that a person or a culture defensively divests itself of its ability to hear its feelings of catastrophe as warning signals, notes Michael Eigen[3].
We could see this as the demens at work. This possibility—the modalities of which remain to be explored—seems highly relevant today. Eigen speaks of the feeling of catastrophe as "the cement that holds the personality together, a fundamental principle of its formation, the sea or atmosphere in which it lives.
This gives a trans-subjective protomental dimension to this feeling, which is experienced at the highest level of intimacy and individuality, while extending into the protomental collective like a mycelium. Is this the faber? The formless and infinite emotional realm onto which the “umbilicus” of dreams opens, according to Freud's famous metaphor? It would also mean considering the faber within us as a “common good,” as an inexhaustible “raw (emotional) material,” a potential source of a “living together” to be reinvented according to the primordial form I have just described: offering others a listening ear for feelings of catastrophe, identifying the signs, giving them meaning, and acting accordingly.
One of the great beauties of psychoanalysis lies, I think, in the fact that it is a “technique” that seeks intrinsic, internal, qualitative solutions to internal emotional conflicts. In this respect, it differs from the compulsion of contemporary homo faber described by Alain Papaux, which drives us to seek ever more extrinsic, technical, quantitative solutions to our intrinsic problems. As such, psychoanalysis appears to be a precious “common good” that must be defended.
References
Bourg, D. (1996). L’homme-artifice. Paris : éditions Gallimard.
Bourg, D., Papaux, A. (2015). Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique. Publié sous la direction de Bourg D, Papaux A, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Descola, P. (2005). Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fressoz, J-B. (2024). MORE and MORE and MORE. An All-Consuming History of Energy. Translated by the author. Penguin Random House UK.
Papaux, A. (2025). HOMO FABER. Pourquoi nous ne ferons rien pour l’environnement. Collection “L’écologie en question” (Ecology in Question), edited by Dominique Bourg and Sophie Swaton, published by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 665 pages.
Serres, M. (2020). Branches. Translated by R. Burks. London : Bloomsbury.
[1] Collection “L’écologie en question” (Ecology in Question), edited by Dominique Bourg and Sophie Swaton, published by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 665 pages.
[2] Fressoz, J-B. (2024). MORE and MORE and MORE. An All-Consuming History of Energy. Translated by the author. Penguin Random House UK.
[3] Eigen, M. (1985). Toward Bion’s Starting Point: Between Catastrophe and Faith. Int. J. Psychoanal., (66):321-330, p. 325.