Video – 0:25:20
John Tresch: There Are No Religions and Science is One of Them
Part of “Wisdom Techniques”
Original version
Lecture, Apr 16, 2016
What place do techniques of the body, mind, and spirit—what Michel Foucault called “the practices of the self”—have in today’s technosphere? The vast range of what Peter Sloterdijk has recently renamed “anthropotechniques”— those regimens of training and repetitive exercise through which people transform themselves—can be seen as a determining fact of human history. Through new trainings, new modes of thought, feeling, intuiting, and acting become possible; byweaving anthropotechniques into new combinations and administering them both as individuals and as masses, humanity has made and remade itself. Ascetic disciplines have been most often associated with religious orders. Yet what are the anthropotechniques which go into the production of scientific knowledge (in observation, experiment, invention)? What regimes of practice have produced expertise? This talk will propose an “anthropotechnical” history of modern science as a means of comparing and linking technoscientific modes of subject-formation with those from other lineages. How might such a history contribute to cultivating the reflective capacities and ethical habits that are needed to shape and care for the technosphere?
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