TèchnoSophìa 0 - Introduction

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We are what we can be; therefore, our identity can only be a technological one. Technology is the capacity both to be and to become. Technology grants us the power of praxis and of the apeiron, allowing us to freely choose between knowing and ignoring.

TèchnoSophìa is a historical journey entirely devoted to contemporaneity, aimed at exploring the parallelism between the evolution of thought and the evolution of technique. On one side, the art of making, building, predicting, transforming; on the other, the search for meaning, measure, and orientation.

Our path must necessarily begin in the squares of ancient Greece, where the nascent technical rationality of the Presocratics first attempted to explain nature (phýsis) without recourse to myth, conceiving it as a process governed by manipulable laws. It was there that Plato and Aristotle, mistrusting manual skill deprived of moral guidance, sought to establish a clear hierarchy: sophía was to govern, téchne to obey. This hierarchical order, though transformed over time, remained the dominant paradigm for centuries.

This architecture of knowledge was dismantled on the threshold of modernity. With Francis Bacon, “knowledge is power” became the new imperative, and with Descartes nature was reduced to a machine at humanity’s disposal. Téchne, once a servant, was thus transformed into a sovereign, promising humankind—through science and industry—the impossible chimera of unlimited progress. Yet from a promise of emancipation, technology gradually revealed itself as an ambivalent force, capable of generating new forms of alienation, domination, and risk. The long shadows of the Industrial Revolution, the critique of instrumental rationality by the Frankfurt School, and Heidegger’s analysis of technology as Gestell — an imposition reducing the world to a mere standing-reserve — marked the point of no return for this unconditional trust.

Today, this tension has become ever closer to our daily lives, manifesting itself in the algorithms and automations that shape our existence, constantly undermining the very notion of human identity. The ecological crisis questions the very meaning of our dwelling on Earth, casting doubt on the possibility of a future.

The ambition is to trace a genealogy of this complex relation, which I consider a pressing necessity. To understand how our current hyper-technologization is the result of precise philosophical choices is the first step toward uncovering the roots of a wisdom capable of orienting it—and toward acquiring the tools that may allow us to forge a new and indispensable alliance between the hand that builds and the mind that questions.